Marsh/synopsis

On New Year's Eve, systime 275 (2399), after a sudden wave of déjà vu, Reed of the Marsh clade and Hanne Marie of her own clade realize that something terrible has happened. Once a year, all of the Marshans merge down to their root instance, Marsh, who enjoys being an aggregate of all of their lives. Reed finds that he cannot. Marsh appears to no longer be a part of the System. It's impossible to merge down and impossible to ping them or send any sensorium messages. He calls a gathering of the rest of the clade — his cross-tree cocladists Lily and Cress, as well as his up-tree instances Rush, Sedge, and Tule — to try and figure out what's happening. There is the loss as well as one year, one month, and eleven days of downtime. Cress and Tule arrive with their partner, I Remember The Dry Grass of the Ode clade, and Marsh's partners, Fenne Vos of her own clade and Pierre LaFontaine of his own clade arrive as well.

Lily greatly distrusts Dry Grass due to her association with the Ode clade and quickly leaves. She feels that the Odists are responsible for much that is wrong on the System, that they are manipulative and conniving political figures. Her feelings are spurred on by having read the Bălan clade's An Expanded History of Our World (which comprises the story told in Toledot) and her frustration with the Odists' attempts to justify their actions as told in the Bălans' Individuation and Reconciliation and Sasha's (née True Name) Ode. Reed, on the other hand, having accidentally merged Tule's memories wholesale, is struck by the sense of intimate familiarity with Dry Grass: despite having only met her a handful of times at various functions, he now has all of Tule's memories of their relationship and love for each other.

As they explore the System and meet up with others from the Ode clade, they discover that Marsh isn't the only cladist missing from Lagrange. On exploration, they begin the process of estimating the impact on the System. The Marshans have lost 14% of their clade, while the Odists have lost apparently 2%. Reading the feeds nets them yet more information, with many discussing suddenly missing friends, lovers, and instances of themselves, with impacts ranging from 99.983% to none.

The Marshans and a few others — Dry Grass and her cocladists Which Offers Heat And Warmth In Fire its partner Hold My Name Beneath Your Tongue And Know, Reed's partner Hanne, and her friend Jess — meet up for dinner to try and regroup. Lily promises to do her best to reconcile with the fact that the Odists are part of the clade's life. With the Ode clade's prior experience of their root instance, Michelle Hadje quitting nearly a century prior, they begin to talk about what life without Marsh will look like.

Given Reed and Sedge's interest in what happened, they are looped in with a loose coalition of individuals working on the investigation. This includes a portion of the Jonas clade, more Odists, Debarre of his own clade, and Selena of her own clade. They contact phys-side to discuss with Jakub Strzepek, an admin, and Günay Sadık, a technician, who confirm that there was downtime and an unrecoverable corruption of about 1% of the 2.3 trillion cladists on Lagrange due to a System-wide crash, though they are cagey as to why. The group chooses Günay as their point of contact rather than any of the admin team while Jonas Fa demands that Jakub confirm, even if only privately, whether or not this was due to some malicious act.

Dry Grass takes Cress, Tule, and Reed out to dinner, where they discuss the fact that Reed has been left with these conflicting feelings about her. He admits that the memories from Tule's merge have influenced his feelings about her, and she suggests that it remain an open conversation rather than something he either push down and ignore or keep only to himself. Reed also discusses this with Hanne, who says that she'll trust him to keep talking to her as well, and with Lily, who admits some frustration but also a willingness to keep up with the clade.

Several clades form a group to interface with phys-side, including the CERES clade (the ones who lost nearly 70k instances) and just Günay. The tech confirms that there was a widespread contraproprioceptive virus attack. CPV had been used in the past to kill single instances such as Qoheleth and several instances of True Name, as it was required that it be tailored to a specific cladist or their immediate instances. However, members of a fundamentalist collective — a group of individuals living as a hive mind of sorts — named the Our Brightest Lights Collective found a way to create a CPV bomb that crashed 100% of the cladists on Lagrange. This event is being called the Century Attack.

During the downtime, the System was restarted several times as various recovery attempts were made. An initial loss of 15% was eventually reduced to 1% with the help of members of the System Emergency Response Group (SERG) on Lagrange as well as on the two launch vehicles, Castor and Pollux. During the attempts to bring Lagrange back online, it was discovered that the number of unrecoverable instances was slowly growing, and so it was determined that 1% would be the maximum acceptable loss, and it was finally brought up for good. There were several fixes applied at this time, including patching out CPV, various ACL improvements, and a laundry list of other updates. Notable among the changes was the ability to merge cross-tree within a clade rather than just down-tree. Jonas demands that this be kept quiet due to the social changes it will have on the System.

Another meeting, this time with en4, a member of The System Consortium, the collection of organizations that manage the L₅ station, Lagrange, and the Ansibles used to upload individuals. They are also a member of a collective, the London Cohort of New Zealots, or LCNZ. They explain the history and reasoning behind the attack. The perpetrator, 8-stanza-1 (a reference to "The only time I know my true name is when I dream", the first line of the eighth stanza of the poem from which the Odists take their name) was recovered and quarantined. The OBLC has stated that they feel that, for every cladist, a life phys-side is denied entry to heaven. Given the 2.3 trillion population of Lagrange, the only solution was to destroy the whole System. I Cannot Stop Myself From Speaking of the Ode clade confirms this via her experiences interviewing 8-stanza-1.

Dry Grass, the Marshans, and Marsh's partners visit the sim containing all of the collected core dumps — the remnants of a crashed cladist — of the unrecoverable losses. Dry Grass learns that her long-lived up-tree instance, In The Wind, a systech, was integral to the recovery efforts, but that she was unrecoverable in one of the final restarts. Lily angrily silences her so that the Marshans can have a funeral of sorts around Marsh's core. Lily, still angry, scorns Cress, Tule, and Reed for their association with Dry Grass and the other Odists. Vos, angry at the way she is interrupting the funeral of her dead partner, demands that Lily leave. Reed follows her and the two fight, with Reed striking Lily in the face. After they calm down, they return to the funeral where the remaining Marshans speak.

As the others leave, Dry Grass asks Cress, Tule, and Reed to stay with her as she visits In The Wind's core, and then invites them home to peace and quiet. Reed is initially confused, but Dry Grass insists that she would like to be around those that enjoy her presence after spending time around Lily, who does not. While there, they process their respective losses, and Reed begins to process his growing, earnest feelings for Dry Grass. He also catches Cress and Tule up on the changes to the System, and they come up with the idea of possibly performing a clade-wide cross-tree merge in order to come up with someone who might be like Marsh.

Reed returns home to Hanne and both speak about the ways in which they are beginning to grieve. He also brings up the idea of this reconstruction of Marsh, and Hanne expresses doubt that this will work, and if it does, that it might cause further grief. When he meets up with Dry Grass the next day on a date for lunch, the two discuss the sense of the world as it has become, Dry Grass's past as a systech — she had left due to the changing nature of the job, but her up-tree instance, In The Wind, remained to keep up on the work — and she also cautions him as to the potential for social pain as a result of this merger.

A meeting with phys-side, happening concurrently, explores the ramifications of the Century Attack, keeping 8-stanza-1 locked in the DMZ, and the mechanism of the CPV device. Jonas and Answers Will Not Help goad Jakub to try and frustrate him into quitting as well as to make Günay feel better, and it's suggested that this is also to encourage her to upload where she can become a long-term asset. Discussions of potential memorials begin, as well as ceremonies both sys- and phys-side. After discussing information consolidation and control, Reed asks about the cross-tree merging and, after a demonstration between Jonas Fa and Jonas Ko, decides to disregard the warnings and go through with his plan to reconstruct Marsh.

The process of the reconstruction is discussed, including the fact that this New Marsh will include all of the clade's memories except Marsh's concludes with each of the Marshans forking and merging into Lily's new instance. The merge itself (minus reconciling conflicts) takes several hours and is an immensely unpleasant process, but New Marsh comes out of it well enough. The clade invites Vos and Pierre over to meet them, but Vos, unnerved, asks the new cladist the last thing that Marsh had said to her. Without those memories, they can't say, so Vos, angered by what she sees as meddling and a shallow attempt at rebuilding her partner without her input, his Reed hard enough to knock him down and leaves, demanding no contact going forward. The Marshans leave to process what happened, and New Marsh renames themself Anubias and decides to continue on as they are, trying to live life as an amalgam.

An epilogue follows (which is co-written by me and my partner) where, about eight months later, Reed has finally received word back from the instance of Marsh that lives on on Castor. He brings this letter along with him as he attends a play put on by Dry Grass's cocladists. The play is a metaphor for the Century Attack, and it leaves all distraught. After, he discusses the letter with Dry Grass and her cocladists And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights, Beholden To The Heat Of The Lamps, and Time Is A Finger Pointing At Itself. They discuss the different ways that they have learned to live as a clade without a root instance and the hopes they have for the future.