Toledot, page 18
part #2 of Post-Self Series
Codrin wrote quickly, not just to keep up, but also to keep eir eyes on the page and away from the by now nearly dancelike gestures that Rankin was using. Ey wondered just how much of it was a conscious decision to be witnessed (and thus perhaps a deeply ingrained need to be seen and not forgotten), and how much of it was some innate characteristic of this certain, special type of asshole.
“Does that make sense, my dear Codrin?”
“Oh, yes. Yes it does, Mr. Rankin.”
He sat back in his seat with a self-satisfied smirk. “I think that you’ll like the end product. I’ve read some of your own works, by the way. You pick some quite interesting projects about our post-human life, though I must admit that your style is quite dry.”
“Such is the life of a historian, I suppose.”
Rankin laughed. “Of course, of course, I forget myself. You’ll have to send me your notes for this current project, and I’ll see if I can pull them together into something coherent and readable.”
Ey bit eir tongue and nodded. “Of course, I’ll see about doing so when I’m done. Back to your work, however; do you have any predictions on how the works will differ?”
“The work, Codrin. It’s a very singular work. Both me and my counterpart are writing the exact same work, and the only difference is the circumstances.” He waved off any reply before continuing. “Though imagine that our two takes began quite similar, and then started to diverge further as time continues, such as a fork might diverge from its down-tree instance. How interesting! A work that, in some core mechanism, follows the exact same path as our daily existence.”
“And you have an editor who is merging these two threads? Are they planning on doing something special with the presentation of it?”
“Yes. Yes! Of course, what is a book but an experience? A book should be delightfully difficult to read, if it is to be enjoyed to the fullest. You are engaging with a topic, you must—must—put in the same amount of effort that the author has! We have plans to arrange the two texts side-by-side, locked together at the points specified in the outline, as well as any similarities that the texts share. Imagine, I, Rankin#Castor, writing, “And so, in my heart of hearts, I knew the truth among the stars” while Rankin#Pollux writes, “And so, in my heart of hearts, I know the truth among the wheeling of the stars.” From there, we can have the texts line up on the page, and perhaps even highlight the similarities. My editor promises that he won’t send me any of the result until it’s complete and ready for manuscript sign off, lest #Pollux’s writing influence my own.”
Once ey had finished jotting in eir shorthand, Codrin asked, “Do you have any idea on how the work will be received?”
“Ah yes, the problem of reception.” Rankin smiled sourly. “Our works have inherent worth, and yet we must, at some point, rely on readers for their validation. I hope that it will be received quite well, though I know that it will go over the heads of many. Such can’t be helped, though, for even in this world of leisure and ease, many still claim that they don’t have time to read. Time! We have all the time in the universe, if we try hard enough, and yet here we are, spinning our wheels on whether or not there’s time enough to read a book! What rubbish.”
“Do you often fork to read books?”
Rankin frowned, at which Codrin took secret pleasure. “No. There are some aspects of life which must be experienced singularly and without the dreary experience of reclaiming memories from a dying mind.”
“Dying?”
“What is the act of quitting but that of death?”
Codrin withheld eir thoughts on the matter, asking instead, “Perhaps there’s a story there, too. Read a book, quit, and then write about the experience of having only the memory of reading that book. It seems to fall in line with the scope of your current project.”
Rankin’s expression grew colder. “An interesting problem for you to tackle, my dear Codrin. I look forward to your monograph on the subject.”
That secret pleasure grew warmer. Ey suspected that Rankin would have enjoyed such a project, had the idea come from within, rather than from someone else. “I’ll have to give it a go, sometime, though I suspect my dry writing will fall short of yours.”
A little bit of sucking up warmed him again, and Codrin once again marveled at what an art conducting interviews was.
“Writing is something that comes from much practice. I can do little but encourage you to practice, practice, and practice some more.” He laughed, jabbing a finger at em. “After all, we have all the time in the world, do we not?”
Ey gave a hint of a bow, a moment of silence to show eir appreciation, and then continued. “Do you have any projects planned after this book? Perhaps something to work on alongside it?”
“Of course! It’s important not to fall into the trap of working on a single project, otherwise you’ll feel obliged to refine and refine and refine! Keep it varied. I’m also working on a novel exploring income inequalities within the System. Or Systems, perhaps. This will hopefully be released concurrent with my main work. This is being done by a separate fork, and we merge weekly on the project. It takes no small amount of focus to keep either one of us from getting sidetracked, but it’s important that we continue our work at a good pace. We may have all the time in the world, but it’s easy enough to be forgotten in our current market if we don’t keep coming out with more and more works, eh?”
“There is that, yes. At least there’s not a livelihood resting on it.”
“Oh but there is! I’m sure that if my words aren’t read, that I’ll disappear into nothingness!”
Ah, Codrin thought. There it is. “Does this drive influence your writing?”
“Oh, here and there,” Rankin said, waggling a hand. “Sometimes I’ll cut corners to ensure that I’m always writing something, or I’ll split off enough forks to work in shifts, ensuring that I’m always writing at all hours of the day, such as it is. One will work a shift, merge with the next to keep the momentum going, and go to bed.”
“That must be a very productive experience.”
“It is! It very much is. You should try it, my dear Codrin.”
“I most certainly will,” ey lied. Ey was no stranger to modified sleep schedules and just how unpleasant that could be. “Do you have any last words of wisdom that you’d like to impart for the eventual readers of this project?”
“I would tell them this: you are always dreaming, but you should always dream bigger. What but big dreams was it that led to these launches? What but big dreams was it that led to the System as a whole? Dream big! Dream your own dreams. Bring them to fruition, and bigger and brighter things will benefit us all.”
Codrin finished eir transcribing with a flourish and bowed to Rankin. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Rankin. Is there anything else?”
“Only to thank you for your time. Make sure you get me your notes, and I’ll make sure that you and Dear each get a copy of the upcoming book once it’s done. Do tell him hi for me.”
“It, but yes, I will say hi.”
“Right, right. Do tell it hi.” Rankin quit before, Codrin suspected, he could roll his eyes.
Ey bit eir tongue until ey was back home at the house on the prairie. Ey stomped out into the grass to eir very first cairn, set eir paper and pens down carefully in the grass, and shouted to the cloud-dotted sky. “What an enormous sack of shit, good Lord.”
Then ey picked up eir supplies and walked back to the house.
Eir partners greeted em at the door, both looking winded and still laughing.
“You heard, I take it?”
“Tell us how you really feel, my dear.”
Codrin rolled eir eyes. “Not a fan. Let me set my shit down and get a glass of wine or something.”
Dear gasped, paw to muzzle. “A curse! Codrin! I am shocked.”
“I’ll get the wine,” its partner said, still laughing.
They gathered on the couch where Codrin could lounge against Dear with eir feet up in its partner’s lap.
“So, how was it, really? Was he really that bad?” Dear asked.
“You didn’t tell me that he was so…so…”
“Pompous? That his head was so far up his ass that he could smell his breath?”
Codrin laughed and poked the fox in the side. “Yeah, those things. I’m guessing you don’t think too highly of him, either?”
“Not particularly, no,” Dear said, brushing fingers through Codrin’s hair. “I was more wondering if a writer—a writer in particular, I mean—might have some ideas that you could glean for this project of ours.”
“I suppose.” Ey kept silent for a moment, simply enjoying the physical contact. “Though, come to think of it, his current project sounds interesting enough.”
“The dual text thing?” Dear’s partner asked.
“Yeah. Did he tell you about that?”
“Mmhm. It sounds interesting, at least on the surface. We’ll have to see how the execution works out, though. It could be stupendously boring.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“It is not a bad idea for a project such as he is wont to do,” Dear murmured, sounding distant. “I would not have turned down the opportunity to do such myself, if the types of projects that I do fit that framework.”
“The thing is, I don’t think it’ll work for ours.” Codrin shrugged against Dear’s thigh. “I don’t think spoiling Codrin#Pollux is something we really need to worry about, and I’m sure Ioan will keep sending us interesting stuff.”
“Probably best to not, actually,” Dear’s partner said.
“Right. Come to think of it, even Rankin said that he started with an outline to keep the two instances organized. We could probably do with more organization between the three of us.”
“Or the three of our groups, at least. Perhaps Pollux and Ioan taken together will provide us with a good idea of where we should be working next.”
“Do you want to send Ioan a note to start coordinating?”
“I just did.”
There was a sensorium ping, a view of the office where Ioan had begun work so many years ago.
“I should’ve known.”
“I am more predictable than you give me credit for, my dear.”
After a moment’s silence, ey grumbled, “He even kept calling you ‘he’. Drove me nuts.”
Dear made a strange face, then threw its head back and cackled. “He has honed his insensitivity into quite the art. What a delight! So, while he was being a pompous ass, did he actually have anything to add to the conversation besides that one idea?”
Codrin shook eir head.
“He always was a one-trick pony.”
“He also kept talking about idioms that applied mostly to phys-side and how they stick around here, on that note. But still, being a one-trick pony is a worry I struggle with.”
“That you struggle with it, that all of us mere mortals struggle with it, is what keeps us separate from them.”
“ ‘Them’?” Dear’s partner laughed. “You make them sound way more organized than they really are.”
“They do not need to be. They are all the same.”
Michelle Hadje/Sasha—2124
It took Debarre a matter of seconds to answer Michelle’s request for a meeting. His arrival in her sim, the weasel blinking into existence next to her on that endless field of grass and dandelions, startled her enough to cause her to stumble.
“Shit, you okay, Michelle?”
She laughed, picking herself back up, feeling as unsteady as ever. “Yeah, I just was not expecting you right away. I thought that you would set up a time later.”
“I was free.” Debarre leaned forward and helped brush some grass off of her side. “Is now not a good time?”
“No, no. Now is fine. Thank you for meeting up in the first place.”
“Of course.”
Michelle led them off at a leisurely pace into the fields, into the warm day and soft hum of bees. Debarre walked along in silence beside her, apparently enjoying the day with his whiskers bristled out and eyes half-shut against the sun.
She’d always intended to build herself a house, but the field always felt so complete without it.
“True Name mentioned that you wanted to talk.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking down at his feet as they poked their way through the dandelions. “But I’m not quite sure where to start.”
“I am guessing that it is about the names.” She mastered a brief wave of anxiety, a brief wave of skunk features across human ones, a brief wave of Sasha among Michelle. “I am afraid that I do not have a fantastic explanation for it.”
Debarre shrugged this off. “I don’t need a great explanation. I don’t need anything, I guess. I just want to know what’s going on, Sasha.”
And with that, with a susurration of fur against clothes, she was Sasha. What thoughts before that had kept her as Michelle, as her human self, had been uprooted for the day and replaced with those that anchored her to a time, a context, a name. Debarre, of all the others that she’d met, seemed to understand this best, and he took this in stride.
“If I am honest, I do not know myself. At least, not truly. It is something that came to me in the moment.” She paused to pluck a dandelion, twirling it between fingerpads, laughing. “I am still a little unnerved by it, myself. I remember thinking to myself, “I need a fucking vacation, but I should fork so that I do not leave the others in a lurch”, and then there it was, the idea, already fully formed and ready to go.”
“To use Aw– to use eir poem for the names?”
She canted her ears back. “I miss em. I have been thinking about em for years.”
“A decade.”
The skunk nodded.
“I think about em a lot, too, Sasha. We were all pretty torn up about it, even if ey’s the one that helped build this place. I remember bawling my eyes out when you read the poem.” He laughed, rubbing a paw over his face. “Hell, when you said all that in the coffee shop, I was having a hard time dealing with a whole shitload of emotions and you were so upset at the bar.”
“The bar?”
“Oh, uh, sorry. True Name was upset at the bar. I started to ask her about all this, and I almost said eir name and–”
“AwDae’s?” she asked, tilting her head.
Debarre flinched back from her, stopping mid-step.
“Debarre?”
He frowned at her, straightening up. “When I tried to say ‘AwDae’ earlier, True Name lost her shit. Like, I was afraid she was going to lunge across the table and deck me. You didn’t know?”
Sasha shook her head. “None of my forks have merged back down to me yet. I– we decided that I would take some time off before reengaging. I have no memory of what happened.”
“It was kind of terrifying.” The weasel laughed. “She slammed her glass down and said something like ‘do not fucking say that name’. I can respect wanting to keep things close to the heart, but I thought I was about to get in a fistfight.”
“I am trying to picture either of us in a fistfight, much less with each other, and failing,” she said, grinning. “I would very much appreciate this being kept between us, yes, but I have no plans to deck you if you say eir name when it is just the two of us.”
“I appreciate that. Why’d True Name seem to think otherwise, though?”
Tossing away the dandelion, she shrugged helplessly. “I do not know. At the point when she came into existence, she ceased being me. We were the same for only the briefest of seconds, but we have long since diverged.”
“That far, though? It’s only been a week or two, right?”
“I suppose so. I will have to check in with her. With the rest of the clade, too, and see if anything else strange is going on. I have not been keeping tabs on all of them.”
Debarre nodded. “They seem like they’re doing fine.”
“They are not taking over the council, then?”
He laughed. “Not at all, no. Just True Name taking your spot in dealing with the politics stuff. I actually haven’t seen many of the others.”
Sasha nodded.
They stood in silence for a few minutes, just enjoying the sun. The vacation had treated her well so far, and she already felt less torn in two without the stress of the council weighing on her. Debarre also had a calming influence on her, as though having one person associated primarily with only one context was enough to pin her in place, rather than having her constantly ping-ponging between two.
Skunk and weasel both sat down in the grass, laughing at having apparently come to the same decision independent of each other.
Debarre plucked a blade of grass and threw it at her. “You reminded me; another thing that True Name said is that when you forked off your ten instances, you left behind the part of you that is split between Michelle and Sasha. She called it ‘the part that suffers’.”
Hiding a wince by plucking a handful of dandelions one by one, Sasha nodded. “I do not think that having ten versions of me who are just as fucked up as I am would have made anything easier.”
During the pause that followed, she began weaving those flowers into a chain.
“Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Suffering.”
Sasha set the half-complete flower-crown on her lap and began to pick another handful of flowers. Anything to keep from looking at Debarre. “I do not know if that is the right word. It was not a deliberate choice to fork each instance only when I was in a more singular state, but I am not displeased that this was the case. That way, they can do what they need to do without…without…”
Debarre did not press her. She worked through her tears, tying the last of the dandelions in place to form the chain into a loop so that she could rest it atop her head, petals tickling at her ears. When she dropped her hands again, the weasel took them in his own.
I can feel em, she thought. I can almost feel em, there in the sunlight, there in the flowers.
