True Name — 2124

The next meeting spot for the Council of Eight was in a rooftop bar. However, given that that rooftop bar was in the midst of a block of apartment buildings and vertical malls that had built with shared walls, such that there was a cubic half-mile of stair-climbing, elevator rides — down as well as up — and trestles that bridged buildings of lower height than higher ones, it was more adventure getting to the venue than the meeting itself promised.

Still, The Only Time I Know My True Name Is When I Dream climbed.

The apartment buildings ranged from serviceable to gutted, and more than one time, she had to step carefully through a path covered in rubble. She could not decipher whether this was due to abandoned renovations, some unknown battle, or the simple degradations of time.

The malls offered different dichotomies. Some of them were sparkling new with speakers that whispered to her in Mandarin and lights that shouted in her face, while others played placid muzak through halls lit only by emergency lights, darkened storefronts yawning onto scuffed and over-waxed parquet floors.

She wondered who it was that had owned this sim, what collective it was that had decided to mash all the best and worst multiple clashing centuries worth of Kowloon Walled City and the North American Central Corridor.

And then, the rooftop bar. Despite no vehicle entrance to the complex, this was situated on the top level of what appeared to be a car park straight out of a mid-western American airport, complete with one or two of those vehicles that seemed perpetually parked, ones that had lingered for months or years, accruing a parking debt of thousands, tens of thousands of dollars.

The bar itself was a pop-up affair, with walls and ceiling of corrugated plastic held together with rivets and tape, a bar-top that was a few two-by-eights set across a trestle, fronted with further corrugated plastic to keep the patrons from kicking fridges or sinks out of alignment.

The drinks: early 2100s hipster bullshit, all intensely sweet or riddled with smoke-scented fizzy water or long strips of seaweed or clams within the ice cubes, steadily making the drink more and more savory over time.

True Name found it all confusing and jarring.

She liked it immediately.

Debarre was already at one of the tables — similarly cobbled together — sipping something that seemed to be all foam. He waved to her as she entered, and she waved back, heading to the bar to pick up one of those seaweed concoctions before joining him.

“That looks fucking gross, Sasha.”

She laughed and shrugged. “I am True Name, but yes, it really does. If we are going to meet in a place that gives me a headache to walk through, it is probably best that I get something with…protein? Is that how this works?”

“Uh, sorry. Yeah. True Name.” The weasel splayed his ears and averted his eyes. “Can we talk about that sometime?”

“Yes, but probably as Michelle, if that is okay.”

“Why?”

“She is…closer to it than I am.”

Debarre gripped his glass more tightly and twisted sideways to swing his leg over the bench and straddle it. “Yeah, I don’t get it. Before everyone else gets here, can you at least give me a sentence or two?”

“When she forked, when I…became me, she decided not to fork that part of her that suffers if that is the right word.” True Name frowned. “Already we are drifting further apart. The species remains, the appearance and the speech patterns remain, the mind remains, but not that part of her that is so split. I am me, I am templated off of Sasha, because being both Michelle and Sasha at the same time was no longer tolerable.”

He shrugged, still staring down into his drink. “I can’t speak to that, I guess. But why Aw–”

True Name slammed her glass down on the table a bit harder than intended, some of the drink spilling over her hand. “Do not say that fucking name.”

The weasel jumped at the sudden intensity, and when he recovered, he finally met her gaze. His expression softened from fear and anger to a tired bleakness. That moment drew out for a long few seconds of quiet and seething sadness. He reached for a napkin from the dispenser at the end of the table and handed it to her. “Here.”

She hesitated, mastered a surge of unnamed emotion, and accepted the napkin to wipe the sticky drink from her paw and then, on realizing that she was crying, the tears from her face. “Sorry, I am just…”

“We’ll talk.” He reached over and gave her dry paw a squeeze in his own. “Michelle and I will. There’s something I’m missing here is all, and I want to figure out why more than what.”

True Name hid her muzzle in her drink and pretended to take a sip until she was sure she wouldn’t slur her words when she spoke. “Thank you. She is open to messages still, I will let you two work it out. For now, I need to focus on the meeting. Jonas and Zeke are here.”

Looking over his shoulder, Debarre nodded and turned to sit on the bench to face her again, leaving room for the other two. Jonas settled next to True Name so that they could give their speech together when the time came, and Zeke, that shifting bundle of rags and grime slid onto the bench beside Debarre.

“Good afternoon,” the almost-face within the bundle rasped.

Jonas grinned. “It’s morning, isn’t it?”

A pseudopod that may have been a hand waved the comment away. “Time has lost all meaning. I seem to have forgotten how to sleep, these days.”

“You need a vacation like Michelle.”

There was a low rattle from the rags, and True Name imagined that must be Zeke’s laughter. “Don’t tempt me. I don’t have the funds to fork, so you’d be down to seven.”

“Why did you make it so expensive?” Jonas elbowed True Name in the side.

She held up her paws defensively and laughed. “I did not. The price is tied to System capacity.”

“The laws of physics were a mistake and reputation is a lie.”

“It is the best limiting factor that we have that is not a complete fabrication, at the moment.”

“I rather miss coins.”

“My dad used to collect coins, you know.”

And so on, until the table was full and the cone of silence fell.

“Sasha? Uh…True Name. Jonas?” one of the well-dressed triad asked.

“Right,” Jonas said, setting his drink down. “The bill. Things are progressing slowly, as they always do, but it sounds like they might start picking up steam shortly. Our main contact on the DDR side, one Yared Zerezghi based out of the Northeast African Coalition, says that some of the governments are starting to take interest in the bill, which could work to our advantage. Having it just be a direct vote would mean that we would have far, far more representatives to convince, since that’d mean essentially everyone on the DDR. The more governments in play, the more the role of the DDR shrinks.”

“How does that even begin to help? Aren’t they super stodgy?” Debarre asked.

“They can be,” Jonas hedged. “But if we can form contacts with each of them, we can argue our case directly. Yared might be the one to give us a good in for the NEAC, and I still have some Western Fed contacts.”

“Anyone for the S-R Bloc or anywhere in SEAPAC? Middle east? India?”

The trio of suits raised their hands. “S-R Bloc. We don’t know any of the oligarchs directly, but we had some big money interests of our own.”

“Israel,” Zeke said, then laughed at the awkward silence that followed. The trio frowned. “Sorry, nothing to be done there.”

“And SEAPAC?”

user11824 shrugged. “I was a nobody, but I was a Maori nobody.”

“You had enough to upload. That has to count for something, doesn’t it?”

He shrugged again.

“We will take all the help we can get,” True Name said. “Even from nobodies.”

“Alright, I’ll poke mom.”

Zeke nodded to True Name. “What’s your take on the situation?”

She stirred her drink to buy herself some time to think. “I think it is leaning our way. One of the big arguments remains speciation, but Yared’s spinning that into a pro-rights argument instead of a neutral- or anti-rights one. His voice is getting louder, too. It sounds like he is getting a lot more upvotes on his posts than before.”

“That’s good.”

True Name nodded. “I think so. He is not the biggest voice on the issue yet, but it sounds like he is probably in the top three.”

“You said he’s NEAC, right?”

“Yeah, Addis Ababa,” Jonas said. “Not exactly the seat of power, but I guess not everything has to be Cairo. Sounds like we have a good mix, at least. No one from South America?”

Everyone shook their heads.

“I suppose that’s alright. They’re a big enough voice in Western Fed, but they’re still in the shadow government side of things. They don’t even have the shadow minister of System affairs.”

“Who does?”

“Lithuania.”

One of the suits laughed, and Debarre looked blank.

“Politics,” Jonas said, grinning lopsidedly.

“If you say so.”

After a moment’s silence, Zeke rasped, “So what are our next steps?”

“Let’s all talk to our respective interests — Zeke too — and we’ll meet again soon. True Name and I will keep working with Yared and guide as best we can from our side. Speaking of, though, any thoughts on the speciation topic?”

Six sets of eyes flitted between Debarre and True Name, between weasel and skunk, then the whole council laughed.

“I don’t give a shit,” user11824 said. “But if your Yared guy can twist that argument against the opposition, then that’s just one more tool, isn’t it?”

“We aren’t seeing that,” the man in the suit spoke up. “Two thirds of our power structure still think child restrictions are a good enough idea that those laws have bled into Russia. I’m pretty sure they see speciation as a positive. What better way to help in population control?”

One of his companions shrugged, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they started putting limitations on uploading by gender, but that’s a separate topic.”

“Zeke?”

The pile of rags shifted in a shrug.

“Debarre? True Name? Anything you can leverage?”

The weasel laughed. “I mean, if you want to point to us as an example to push that along, and Yared’s tack seems to be working, go for it.”

“Alright. It’s something you can suggest to your respective interests if you think it’ll help. We’ll reevaluate next meeting. Anything else on the agenda?”

Everyone shook their heads, then lifted their glasses to a toast. The cone of silence dropped.

“Well, then, you are all free to stick around or go if you want,” True Name said. “I am going to stay and get well and truly plastered.”