Madison Rye Progress

Beholden

@pengosolvent

We are the same age, yes? We are both of Michelle Hadje, yes? We were both born in 2086, we both uploaded in 2117, we both lived latent in that one mind. Yes, she was forked first. Yes, I was forked from her some years later. I am precisely as old as she is in a very fundamental way.

But I am also not. I have been the same 32 for centuries, now. 32 by numbers, of course; I have been many different people as my identity and the way in which I move through the world as evolved, but I still feel 32.

My love does not.

I have had to learn a new way to love. I have had to keep an eye on just how rambunctious I am with her. She has asked me explicitly not to stop, but...well, some weeks back we lay in bed and, when I clutched at her in the heat of the moment, she pulled back in pain and overstimulation and began to cry, and then I began to cry for this unintentional pain I had caused to someone so dear, and our third was left in baffled panic.

Her world will dissolve around her and I will take her gently by the arm to bring her to the couch or our bed and I will make her tea or sit beside her in kind-but-fretful silence or go lay down on the couch in my music room for an hour.

Do not get me wrong, I remain absolutely head-over-heels for this woman. I am going nowhere. I will always be by her side.

But on those nights or afternoons or mornings when she speaks of the sudden and painless kiss of death, when she clenches her eyes shut and the blanket is too heavy, when even my presence is too overstimulating and I go and lay down on my couch, I am at my most exhausted.

Spoiler level: none

Serene; Sustained And Sustaining:

I created a swamp some time ago. It is quite boggy and wet, with open water, banyan trees, and patches of what look like solid ground, but which are actually patches of water grasses that cannot support the weight of a person. Winding throughout it is a rotting wooden bridge-path that ducks between the trees and leads from patch to patch of those grasses, all but inviting you to step off and sink down to your waist in brackish and algae-slimed water.

It was quite poorly received — too many bugs, too poor a smell, too hot and muggy — and for that, I am deeply in love with it. This reception means that I am wildly successful in what I set out to do. I, haver of fur, am mostly immune to the bugs, and I can turn down my sensorium to deal with the scent, but I love walking between the trees, squatting on the rickety path and poking through the grasses, watching the gar and caimans float idly by.

What can I say? I am a sucker for so imperfect a land.

This swamp shows up in Marsh, and here are some of the inspirations from it from a place I visited daily some years back.

Second half of the drive today. I imagine I will be getting further panoramas.

Made it to Little America in WY

Made it to Fort Collins, our destination. For those who have read Qoheleth, this is where

We sat for a while in silence, sipping at our drinks in the sun-dappled corner seat of the coffee shop, me with my exquisite pour-over and ver with ver tea that ve promised me was delightful.

"And is there anything you regret?"

I startled back to awareness, eyes glancing over ver way, the bemused grin that ve gave me over the rim of ver tea. "Uh...I missed something again, didn't I?"

Ve laughed, nodding. "I have asked you this question twice in the last ten minutes, and each time you get distracted by the street outside. Perhaps I should ask what has captured your attention instead."

I shook my head. "That's easy, I can tell you that in a sentence. It's not busy."

"'Not busy'?"

I nodded. "It's not busy. I mean, there's people out there, sure. Quite a few, actually."

"Some of them may be constructs to give a sense of a bustling small town," ve said. "But certainly not all of them."

"Right, I remember learning about that when reading up on this place." I nodded out to the street, the park beyond, the couples and triads and happily single instances relaxing in the grass. "But there's not, like...a kajillion people out there. It's not packed."

"I see. Yes, there may be some two trillion instances here, but they are not all in one place. They are not all in the same sim."

"So where are they?"

Ve shrugged. "There are, ah..." Ve tilted ver head, then said, "There are a few hundred billion sims, my dear. Not everyone is crammed into a few small ones."

"And I've still seen crowded ones. The big cities, the weird nexuses, the central library."

Ve nods.

"Anyway, that's what I was thinking about."

"Does that have anything to do with your regrets?"

I laughed. "I don't know, maybe. I guess a part of me regrets not being born earlier so that I could see this place as full of unexplored potential with just a few tens of thousands of people on it."

"They were heady days, to be sure. It felt like we had been plopped down in the middle of a blank canvas. An infinitely large blank canvas. We were the paints, and we smeared ourselves out with reckless abandon, painting lives and spaces."

"You're weird, you know that?"

Ve snorted. "Guilty."

"I wish I'd gotten to see that, though," I said, dragging us back on topic. "I wonder what I would have created? Would I have gotten into food? Sims? Traditional art? I was kind of a blank canvas when I uploaded a few years back. I feel like I could have gone anywhere when I got here."

"Did you spend a while in hedonism?" ve asked. "Most do, when first they upload. Some months or a year sampling every pleasure known to posthumanity."

"God, yeah. I can't count the times I ate myself sick."

Ve laughed.

"I guess I don't regret it so much that I want to go back to before all of this variety."

"It was not lacking, but I do see what you mean."

"I guess I regret not experiencing that potential. I regret that I'll never see anything like that again."

Ve settled back and sipped at ver tea, a thoughtful expression on vis face that I couldn't even begin to pick apart.

Finally, ve said, "Perhaps we must make our own potential. Replace regret with determination."

"I don't know if it's that easy."

"Few things are, my dear."