Anonymous User asked: What dk you think about phys-siders? You have the endless expande of centuries laid out before you, when they so often have but a handful of decades. It all seems so terribly tragic.
Spoiler level: consequential — Selected Letters
And The Only Constant Is Change:
It is all so terribly tragic.
When Douglass joined us, he hoped to meet his ancestor here at last. He rather idolizes her, something that only amplified the tragedy of his arriving when he did. But he has all of us, her up-trees — direct or indirect — to tell him ninety-nine stories about ninety-nine Michelles Hadje, and the promise of many more to be told by our unspoken forks.
In death, I mean to say, the memory of who she was is quite literally preserved in us. And, with our perfect recollection, we each hold a piece of the story about what she became on the System. In this, we are bathed in fortune.
But there are plenty who look to the System with fear. They raise objections as to the continunity of self, a natural observation from those whose closest brush with oblivion is most often sleep. We dispersionistas take for granted the significance of quitting, even when preserving another self.
Motes and Heat And Warmth falling over one another a dozen times, wrestling with each other in an ephemeral game of leapfrog, must surely horrify those phys-side who warn of transporter paradoxes as each tail-end instance yields to the next and quits. How macabre the squeals of laughter must be to their ears, how unsettling the smiles on their faces as they settle in the grass with glee, overjoyed at the serial murders they both have just committed.
And then there is time. It is easy for us to forget about phys-side on account of all the System has to offer us. Easier, still, for the only faded memories we can have are of the world before, and many are so miserable. Some of us came here seeking to help reclaim the Earth, and nearly as many eventually succumb to escapism.
There are the families we left behind, and if we are not careful, they are gone before we know it. Those flicker-lives yet bound to Earth are still our kin, as Ioan was painfully reminded when ey at last looked into what became of Rareș in eir absence. Many who came here before the 2170s look to the prospect of immortality with relief. Many of those who came after, pointedly, did not.
Why did Rareș not join his sibling when the years began to take their toll? What life did he live so worthy of death? Did he set a headstone for Ioan when ey uploaded to fund his education? Did he mourn when his sibling did not write him as frequently as he would have liked?
It is all so terribly tragic, but I do not pity them.
(by @hamratza)
See also: Toledot, "Selected Letters", and "Earthbound".
Dear The Wheat And Rye Under The Stars:
Of course it is strange to inhabit the Earth no longer, To follow no longer the customs so newly acquired, To invest no longer with future humanity Such promising things as roses, ... And being dead is full of the labor of catching up, As one gradually acquired a sense of eternity.— But the living always make the mistake of too sharp a distinction. ... In the end, they need us no longer, those taken in youth. One gradually weans oneself from the earthly... ... But we, Who need such great mysteries, for whom out of grief So often comes blessed improvement—: could we be without them?
