Books
The Post-Self Cycle
Book I — Qoheleth
“All artists search. I search for stories, in this post-self age. What happens when you can no longer call yourself an individual, when you have split your sense of self among several instances? How do you react? Do you withdraw into yourself, become a hermit? Do you expand until you lose all sense of identity? Do you fragment? Do you go about it deliberately, or do you let nature and chance take their course?”
With immersive technology at its peak, it’s all too easy to get lost. When RJ loses emself in that virtual world, not only must ey find eir way out, but find all the answers ey can along the way.
And, nearly a century on, society still struggles with the ramifications of those answers.
Features the bonus novella Gallery Exhibition: A Love Story.
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Book II — Toledot
“I am saying that you trust me — really trust me — and that life in the System is more subtle than I think you know. You let me into your dreams, my dear, and your dreams influence this place as much as, if not more than, your waking mind.”
No longer bound to the physical, what lengths should one go to in a virtual world to ensure the continuity of one’s existence?
Secession. Launch. Two separations from two societies, two hundred years apart. And through it all, so many parallels run on so many levels that it can be dizzying just keeping up. The more Ioan and Codrin Bălan learn, the more it calls into question the motivations of even those they hold most dear.
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Book III — Nevi’im
“Do you know how old I am, Dr. Brahe? I am 222 years old, a fork of an individual who is…who would be 259 years old. I am no longer the True Name of 2124. Even remembering her feels like remembering an old friend. I remember her perfectly, and yet I do not remember how to be earnest. I do not know how to simply be.”
The cracks are showing.
Someone picked up on the broadcast from the Dreamer Module and as the powers that be rush to organize a meeting between races, Dr. Tycho Brahe is caught up in a whirlwind of activity. And as always, when the drama goes down, there is Codrin Bălan to witness it.
When faced with eternity in a new kind of digital world, however, old traumas come to roost, and those who were once powerful are brought to their knees
Growth is colliding with memory, and the cracks are showing.
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Book IV — Mitzvot
“To be built to love is to be built to dissolve. It is to be built to unbecome. It is to have the sole purpose of falling apart all in the name of someone else.”
Even the grandest of stories can feel small and immediate when it’s just one person’s life.
One of the most well-known names from one of the most well-known clades on the System, the avatar of political machinations and cool confidence, has been brought low. With help coming only from Ioan Bălan and the most grudging of support from her cocladists, all True Name has left to save herself is the ability to change.
Features the bonus novella Selected Letters.
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The HaShichzur Collection
Marsh
“I am seeing quiet chaos. I am seeing most of my sims emptying out. The ones that are not empty, however, remain dreadfully quiet. Most of those who are out and about have set up over themselves cones of silence. Those who have not, though, are decidedly not quiet. More than one silence has been broken by weeping and wailing.” Marsh
New Year’s Eve, 2399, and Lagrange is celebrating almost three centuries of relative peace. Yes, there have been surprises, there has been drama and political intrigue, but life has, by and large, been quite good for those who have chosen to upload their consciousnesses. The celebrate birthdays and anniversaries. They fall in and out of love. They fork, creating copies of themselves to accomplish tasks or live out their own independent lives. Their memories build up and up forever within them.
And then, without warning, everything comes grinding to a halt. The internal clock of the System hits one second before midnight, December 31, 2399, and then it hits midnight, February 11, 2401. One year, one month, and eleven days have gone missing.
And so has one percent of the population of Lagrange. 23 billion souls lost.
Reed and the rest of his cocladists, fellow instances forked from the original uploaded mind of Marsh, must strive to discover what has happened and where Marsh has gone, rendering them unmoored, five unconnected instances with no root to connect them.
What happened? A crash? Where has time gone? Where have those billions of minds gone? And why is Earth being so cagey?
Idumea
The Woman was too present. She was too much herself, too human, too embodied within her vessel as it spiraled out of control, too stuck in her mind as it twisted in on itself.
Readers, you must understand that she was in so many ways whole still!
I think that The Woman would say, however, that she was too whole. I think she would say that she was too full, too much, too alive. I think she would say that almost three hundred years of a life that was lived as hers was too much life. I think she would laugh that hoarse, dry laugh that always sounded like tears were on the way and say that thirty years was probably too much for her.
But me, friends? What will become of me?
A tale of the escape from suffering in a digital world — and the effects of trauma on the functionally immortal.
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Clade — A Post-Self Anthology
Clade (n) – /kleɪd/ – post-self theory
A group of individuals patterned off a single root consciousness, formed through branching expansion of the forking of its constituent members.
See also: cladistics, cocladist, up-/down-/cross-tree instance, forking, post-self theory.
— The System Central Library Encyclopedia
To split oneself among however many individuals, to let the mind drift and diverge, to feel the world from points of view not your own, and then let those memories crash down into you…well, it inspires a feeling best described as ‘heady’, to say the least.
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Unintended Tendencies
This is the story of one soul, shortly after upload to a vast digital world, exploring themself and their identity. Checking the boundaries of who and what they are, peeling back the layers of gender, self, and species. All the while discovering the fractures that lay beneath along with the trauma carried from the years before upload as they grapple with their own life, past, and future in the unlimited world of the System.
Motes Played
Motes played.
She played because she was play. She played because that was her role in life, because that is just who she was. She played with color, played with life, played with death.
She played with fire.
Motes played, because how could she not?
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