Work Text:
I am sitting at an unfamiliar desk in a hotel on Apokine, writing in the dark so as not to wake you. My fingers navigate a virtual keyboard, working by phantom touch. This is a feeling I've always had: simply knowing the positions of digital objects, the way a person knows their hand is in front of their face, even with their eyes closed.
You lay behind me, wrapped snugly in the sheets of what will tomorrow - today, now - become our wedding bed. If I touched your shoulder, you would wake up, and you would ask me what was wrong. I would say I can't sleep for nerves. You would hold me and reassure me, and you wouldn't be upset that I woke you up, even though we have an early morning.
I am choosing, instead, to write. It's something I've done during restless hours for as long as I can remember. Though I crave your waking company, there's a specific type of calm that comes from something so familiar as writing in the dark. (And in truth, my darling, you are something of a monster when you're underslept. I don't mean you're not effective and competent and unbelievably hot; I just mean you might have a harder time with something intended to be joyful.) I imagined, for a brief moment, rewriting my vows to you entirely. They seemed suddenly feeble, too thin to hold the depth of you, of us. Of course they are. What words could ever contain those depths? But our vows are words we wrote together, and so I wouldn't change them for the world.
What I'm writing instead is… this. A diary? A letter to you? I don't know, and that in itself is somewhat thrilling. It's so rare now that I sit down to write without a clear idea of where I'm going. This free-form rambling is a breath of fresh air.
It's also been a long time since I've written without publication in mind. Even now, alone except for you, I can't help trying imagine somebody reading this in an academic journal. What a change that would be from my usual work! Not least because you're in it. We've tried so hard to spare you from the limelight - can you imagine my pre-wedding jitters on display for everyone to see?
But there is something compelling in the idea of making plain your importance to me. I'm not sure even you know, Addax, how central you've really been in my life. When I met you, all those years ago, I was a vastly different person to what I am now. I had been singled out from a young age for my abilities, studied and probed and fashioned into a hero without reference to my own desires. OriCon hardly knew what I was, I hardly knew what I was, and then you strode down those colorful Diaspora stairs and changed my life forever.
In some ways, all my academic work is an attempt to understand what I became after knowing you. As a child, I came to be called a Stratus, and I accepted that metaphor. I was dispersed; I hung in the air. I imagined the universe as a billion little particles, each containing a tiny bit of me in them. It was a good metaphor to explain how I experience the world. But it was incomplete, and its incompleteness allowed me to be objectified and militarized. I felt like a mist: something to be navigated, never truly looked at.
But you, Addax, you saw me. Even at first, when you were so suspicious of me. You recognized something in me that nobody else had seen, saw the man hiding within the mist. I've never written about the similarities between Stratii and Candidates, but they feel especially potent when I think on you and me. Here we were, two children turned into living weapons, our bodies and minds attuned to the technical, the machinistic, the social and physical infrastructures underpinning our respective worlds. We were supposed to be the air that others moved through. But when you saw me, and I saw you, I think we both realized that this was impossible. I saw how human you were, how alive and how unique. I saw that you had been made something more and less than a person, and I saw that you were still a person despite this. I saw that you saw all this in me. And so I was forced to understand that I, too, was not just air.
But this recognition wouldn't come to fruition for another decade. I've been asked in interviews about that time when we were apart, declared missing or killed in action. I've always dodged the question, and even now, with you so tangible in this room with me, I can't bring myself to describe that separation. This, too, is a product of the difficult work of personifying myself: to assert that the story of my life is not public property. You know this already, my darling, but my imagined reader does not. They aren't aware of how hard we've worked to be this secretive, or what we had to protect. I'll say this, for your benefit and theirs: those ten years were by far the worst of my life, even worse than what came before. I believed myself to be an instrument, and a faulty one at that. The memory of you was my greatest, sometimes my only solace. What I didn't let myself see is that in this, I was turning you into an instrument as well. I imagined a world where you and I were tools, and if I moved us just right, I could save us all.
But this, too, is the nature of a Stratus. We're told that Stratii are particularly adept at fighting Divines, but really, we just understand them better. A Divine is named for something it's supposed to represent, and believes itself to be that thing. I know what that's like better than most humans - and of course, so do you. My beliefs about myself, about others, about the future - these have always shaped my world in a very direct manner.
So when people say that Stratii represent a synthesis between humans and machines - they're not exactly wrong. (You, Addax, may be shocked to hear me give some credit to a description which I've adamantly opposed for years now.) The problem is that people assume this synthesis to be some sort of barrier falling apart, when that barrier never existed in the first place. Technologies - mechanical, social, philosophical - these have always been a part of us, and we've always been a part of them. You and I simply understand that more intimately than most.
That day in Centralia, when I saw you - really saw you, in the flesh - I felt it all over again. The shift in the universe, the blossoming deep inside of me that said I am here, and you are here, and that means both of us are real . I had lived so long on the memory of that feeling, the echo of it, that I could hardly stand it in its full force.When you held me, it was like remembering I had a body. It was that awareness, forced on me again, that I was not an instrument, but a person who could fall in love.
The reader in my mind likely knows a little bit more about what happened next - I don't think anyone in the Golden Branch could forget. I remember the late nights and the desperate plans, the calls with friends we hadn't spoken to in ages. (It hurts to mention Sokrates, doesn't it? Today of all days, they should be here with us.) What were we then, Addax? Were we weapons, or people? Had we found a way to be both at once? Or was our dedication to stopping Rigour its own form of capitulation? I remember wanting to give up then, as I had before; wanting to leave the sector entirely and take you with me. There were times when I asked you whether we hadn't been through enough already, and you said it wasn't a question of our past, but of everyone's future. There were times when I begged you to stop working and look at me. You always did, and that was how I was able to stay. Because when you saw me, you really saw me. You saw that I was real and feeling and alive, and that was what we were fighting for. As long as you could keep seeing me, I felt confident that we could win.
And we did. It cost so damn much - so many living, feeling people - but we beat it. It was nearly a decade ago, and still I can hardly believe it. You, and me, and all the Branch together.
And - you know this better than most - we're still fighting. Because while the mechanical infrastructure of Rigour, the metal and the mind-control, are gone, the social technology that brought it into being still exists. There are still those who would turn people into something more and less than they are. Whether it's an OriCon magnate using workers like replaceable parts, or a Divine and its Candidate making themselves into an embodied idea, or a Demarch looking at a map and wondering what territory could be theirs - those are the ghosts of Rigour, living inside all of us, just as powerful in their own way. But when you look at me, and you see me, I know that they, too, can be beaten.
In this dark room, I can hear you breathing. In a moment I'll stand up from this desk, and turn, and there you'll be. I'll take my spot next to you, and maybe I'll sleep, and tomorrow (well, today) we'll get married. It sounds so mundane when you put it in writing. But it's a hard-won mundanity. I'm glad I get to share it with you.