Toledot, page 20
part #2 of Post-Self Series
What at first looked like a bundle of rags set in the middle of a rocky, arid plain, slowly raised an arm up toward the sky. It was a shaky movement, exhausted, as though the movement caused it great pain. Surrounding the bundle was a scattering of what looked to be clay pots, each of which was lidded with a wooden stopper, and in the air was a foul scent.
“Ezekiel?”
A low rasp came from the pile of rags. “Codrin Bălan. I have been waiting for you.”
Unable to think of anything else to do, ey sat down next to the bundle of rags. Hidden within it may have been a face, but ey wasn’t sure. “Waiting for me?”
“Yes. A voice from within spoke to me and I knew it to be that of the Lord, and I fell down upon my face, and it entered into me and set me back on my feet, and held out a scroll. He said to me, “Mortal, eat what is offered you. Eat this scroll.” So I opened my mouth, and He gave me this scroll to eat, as he said to me, “Mortal, feed your stomach and fill your belly with this scroll that I give to you.” And I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey to me.”“
A long pause followed, during which Codrin did not speak, but silently wished for the scent of honey, rather than the scent of something burning.
“And so I knew that you were to come and to take my story.”
Ey nodded. “I’ve come to interview you, yes. A few members of the Ode clade suggested that I seek you out.”
A dry rattle sounded from within the dusty rags, and it took em a moment to understand that this was laughter. “Yes. Yes, of course they did. Speak, Codrin Bălan. Ask me your questions.”
“I have a few. Some about the launch, and some about Secession.”
“Ask me first about Launch.”
“Did you leave a fork behind on the L5 System?”
“No,” he said. A finger rose tiredly from the upraised hand. “The word of the Lord came to me: O mortal, turn your face towards man’s iniquity in the heavens and prophesy to them and say: O cruel men of machinations, you have broken your treaties with the earth which God has set before you, and though it be the doing of the many who are one, leave now the world of your birth that it be washed clean of your sin. You may have hoped for life as gods of the false idols, but the heavens are no longer yours for such arrogance.”
Codrin remembered the admonition to be kind and patient, to be careful, and so ey sat in silence, as seemed appropriate.
“Those who sought to build their temple continue here, yes, and continue there, but judgement will yet come to them. I have seen the fire encased in flame and the sun’s eagerness to send us on our way, and that is my reason for leaving them behind, and I am to lay here for three hundred and ninety years, arm outstretched to the System, and live off the cakes of wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and emmer, until perhaps we cross the threshold of the firmament.
“We diverge, Codrin Bălan. We of Castor and Pollux. The prophets diverge and so too the prophecy. How can two divergent prophecies be true? And yet they must, for the voice of the Lord has given us the scroll as sweet as honey, and our minds must be as one, though they be as split as the broken one.”
When the speech appeared to have concluded, Codrin bowed eir head. “That answers many of my questions, Ezekiel. You speak of the many who are one. Do you mean the idea of clades?”
“Yes. Some are the many who are one. Jonah, who is many that are one. Michelle, who is few that are one.”
Ey once more remained quiet, mind churning over what seemed to be the root of the Ode clade. Michelle? Breaking the treaties with the earth which God set before her? Michelle, who left the world of her birth? And who was this Jonah?
“There were eight of us,” Ezekiel said, and something about its voice sounded clearer, more present than it had before. “A council set to guide but not govern. We were to be the interface between our world and the Earth. The three from the East, the prophet, the nameless one, the politician, the broken one and her friend.”
Ezekiel must be the prophet, and surely Michelle was the broken one. Ey didn’t know the rest of the references, so ey filed the information away until later to look up. Ey felt the need to be completely present for the prophet.
“Guide towards Secession?”
“Not at first. At first, we were to be one people in two forms: those who had life entire on the earth that God set before them, and those who lived beyond death. Those who lived on Earth saw the idolatry in the System and with the help of True Name and Jonah, built up a religion of separation, that we be two people in two forms.”
“True Name?”
The prophet turned a weary head towards Codrin. There was definitely a face there, ey saw, though it was dirty and blended seamlessly into the tattered rags that surrounded it. “One piece of the broken one.”
Ey closed eir eyes and rifled through the Ode that ey kept near to hand in an exocortex. There were two instances of the phrase; ‘The only time I know my true name is when I dream’, and ‘To know one’s true name is to know god’. Both of them made sense as a possibility, as the first was the first line of that stanza and would have been one of the earliest forks, but the second named god, which fit well with Ezekiel’s role as prophet.
After a moment’s thought, ey asked eir question, choosing eir words carefully. “The True Name who dreamed, or the True Name who knew god?”
Another raspy cackle came from the bundle of rags. “You need not mince your words with me, Codrin Bălan. I am the mystic, you are the poet. The Only Time I Know My True Name Is When I Dream, a broken vessel for a broken soul.”
Ey smiled cautiously, feeling a heat in eir cheeks. “Is True Name on the launch?”
“Yes.”
“Are they on the System as well?”
“Yes.”
“Should I interview them for this?”
Ezekiel once more turned his gaze toward the sky, supposing that that is where the abandoned planet must lie. “No. The Lord has put cords upon you, so that you cannot turn from your path. Your twin and your root shall seek her out, but you must seek out one borne of her, and you must seek out more of the eight who were to guide but not govern, and you must seek out Jonah, and you must see to your loved ones.”
Codrin nodded, taking down the list of names—if names they were. Ioan and Codrin#Castor would get to talk to True Name, apparently. I’ll get one of her up-tree instances, more of the Council of Eight, and this Jonah. Loved ones…Dear, perhaps?
“What should I ask them?”
“Ask them what you asked me. Each shall give you a different answer, and when they are brought together, you may see the past and write your poem, poet.” His arm began to waver, and then dropped once more to his side. “I am tired, Codrin Bălan, and I must eat and drink.”
Ey nodded and stood, folding eir notes and capping eir pen. Much as Dear said, ey thought. Combine the sources for a more clear picture. Ey said, “Thank you, Ezekiel. I hope that you enjoy your meal.”
A final rattling laugh, and the arm fumbled to the side where a flat cake had been cooking atop a pile of what looked like smoldering dung. Once more, his voice lost the edge of prophecy and became more cogent. “It’s vile stuff, but I’ll try.”
Yared Zerezghi—2124
Yared Zerezghi: I’m going to come clean right up front: I shouldn’t be telling you this.
Jonas Prime: 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. 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 won’t 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.
True Name: I mean, I am also laughing my ass off.
Yared: I’m just more shocked than anything.
Jonas: I promise it’s not out of cruelty, we just made a lucky guess, and I’ve been wanting 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. Very few people pay as much attention to you as we do.
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: Well, alright. How does this all work, anyway?
Yared: I meet up with my handler, of sorts, on a 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 that one 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 council members, 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 suspended.
Jonas: Alright, I’ll try. I promise, no stoning. The number one advantage that we have is an entire team of instances 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, 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. We haven’t seen evidence of that yet.
Yared: Multiple phys-side politicians?
True Name: Multiple Jonases.
Yared: Oh! There are multiple forks working on this?
Jonas: Of course.
Jonas: That’s what I mean when I said few people pay as much attention to you as we do.
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 how he got me working for him. 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. He’s mentioned them all in passing.
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 shitty thing to do.
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 two or three times, 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. 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 statehood, 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 the word ‘statehood’ directly.
True Name: Do you have anything written yet?
Yared: Sure, one moment.
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 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, just as we 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, they still are.” Other days, though, I’ll wake up and think, “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, even if only at one remove. “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 there.”
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. I think that way whether or not they’re humans, whether or not they have 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.
