Stutter

<Epi> [Time: Several years ago. Place: the middle of nowhere.]
<Epi> [By "the middle of nowhere" I do legitimately mean "nowhere", such as "nowhere" has a middle when it does not have a consistent spacetime boundary or physical rules.]
<Epi> [But this is nitpicking.]
<Epi> [A room, in a Derse battleship. Your... you're not sure if "sister" at this point, but certainly someone you care about and who cares in return.]
<Epi> [...although properly speaking /time/ wouldn't have meaning in the middle of this particular nowhere, were it not for a certain timetrav...]
<Epi> [Rambling.]
<Epi> ["She stopped caring when I was in presession of 14."]
<Epi> [You're in the middle of the story, though the beginning of the memory.]
<Epi> [And you've even told this story before, in bits and pieces, fits and starts, although it's never quite come together like this and likely never quite will again.]
<Epi> ["Myra had always - talked little about where she came from, and less about what it was like."]
<Epi> ["I knew she assumed I had it easy."]
<Epi> [You enumerate your sessions, eleven through fourteen; your titles; what Myra taught you, each time.]
<Epi> [She wrote you when you came in from the Black riding a timetrav, back in eleven. After you'd known her the first time. After you'd lost her the first time. This was the second time.]
<Epi> [You like to think you were better about it this time around.]
<Epi> [You're not sure if this is a delusion, although if it is, it's no more delusion than anything else in fallible memory.]

<Epi> [Elsewhere, elsewhen. Same room, same couch, different conversation. Same memory.]
<Epi> ["It wasn't a pretty presession that started me off in fourteen."]
<Epi> [The details come organized sometimes and they come tumbling, or don't come, other times.]
<Epi> [Someone had been shot. Someone else had been accused of it. Skin colors were different. The city was turned upside-down.]
<Epi> [Sometimes you stop and marvel at the irony, that a type of candy ended up being one side's protest symbol and the company apparently made a lot of money off it. The rebel sell at its finest.]
<Epi> [Sometimes you stop to describe what the layout of the city was like, enclaves of black or enclaves of white. You watched the news helicopter footage, after. Pits didn't exist yet, but you'd written a primitive crawler so that you could look through the Internet at your leisure, later, when time pressed less.]
<Epi> [Then there were the riot police.]
<Epi> [Then there was the blood.]
<Epi> [It is at this point that the story starts breaking up, like antenna television in a storm.]
<Epi> [Sometimes it's about the fact that you holed up in an abandoned apartment in one of the apartment blocks above a street that had turned from safe to contested in less than twenty minutes, trapped there by what was happening below, grocery run cut short halfway by the fact that your replayee didn't have a car and at that point you hadn't learned how to hotwire them yet.]
<Epi> [Sometimes it's about the fan-shaped scalds of Molotov cocktails, early mornings, because that was the safest time to go anywhere, while nearly everyone was asleep.]
<Epi> [Sometimes it's about being waved through a police checkpoint and looking back and realizing that the person ahead of you that didn't make it through had only been carrying a pocketknife.]
<Epi> [Sometimes it's about the time you looked through a window, another abandoned apartment, another street of blood and batons below, and despaired about doing something.]
<Epi> [You knew /something/ about first aid, you were a Replayer, and so at some point - you don't even know how long it was - you descended to help clean up, afterwards.]
<Epi> [Then there was gas, and an arm broken, somewhere, and you remember how it sounded but you very definitely did not remember if it was yours or not.]
<Epi> [Sometimes, at this point, the picture dissolves. Other times, it resolves: your Replayee's apartment, bandages, Sburb.org's forum. Typing with one hand.]
<Epi> [There's still about a month left of presession to go, at that point, and you give up.]
<Epi> [The world is going to die, anyway, and you're not going to throw away what little you have helping.]
<Epi> [But it's too late. You already have.]

<Epi> [It's not too much later that she stops talking to you.]
<Epi> [Myra's always held you to a higher standard. Because you can cope with it, she says. Because you know better, she says. Because you're more capable, she says.]
<Epi> [And it /has/ grown you. Except this time, she's asked too much.]
<Epi> [She wants you to sacrifice more than you already have. Set up a mesh network, hack into someone or another's computers, arrange for tactics, something, anything.]
<Epi> [In memory reconstruction, the "anything" in this statement begins to have a hysterical edge to it.]
<Epi> [Because it was like what she went through.]
<Epi> [And she can't stand the thought of you not doing something about it.]
<Epi> [And you refuse, because the world will end very soon, soon enough, and you've already got a major liability when you have to fight your way up to the first gate as soon as the Game starts and you are /not/ taking on any more risk, because though the Game guarantees you survive to entry, it does not guarantee one whit more.]
<Epi> [She doesn't reply.]
<Epi> [She doesn't reply to the next three messages, either.]
<Epi> [And then there is one, finally, but all it says is "I wish you the best of luck with living with yourself for the rest of your life".]
<Epi> [It sounds strange now in the time when you've just brought the Seer Network down, but the Seers were some comfort in those days. Vitt sent you a complex data-analysis project that kept your mind off things. Nobody asked pointed questions.]
<Epi> [And you learn later, with the file release and years to look through the discussions you hadn't been able to read then, that they spent much of the time wondering how best to help you, and the only thing for it was, apparently, time.]

<Epi> [The clock speeds back up after then, a new session and things to do in it, but this time you don't answer questions because when you try the antenna makes the picture stutter and you end up buried under a mountain of still image memories.]
<Epi> [Free association becomes dangerous, and yet it happens more than ever - one sensation leading to another, leading to another, leading to what you can no longer put into words.]
<Epi> [Your dreamself finally figures out, some time before /you/ do, that there's something wrong enough to say something to the other people in your session about, and does so.]
<Epi> [But the words "I wish you the best of luck with living with yourself for the rest of your life" echo, and it's all you can do to turn the echo chamber down, let alone remove it.]
<Epi> [They echo through fifteen, and sixteen.]
<Epi> [In your seventeenth session she kills herself.]
<Epi> [She leaves a will. In the will, she mentions many people, including conatives you've only heard her mention once or twice, but she never says a word about you.]
<Epi> [You're used to the antenna stuttering now, and it's something you can deal with. But her words, her words...]
<Epi> [The ship's engines pulse, faintly, sub-bass, and you cry into someone's shoulder because it's better than having no shoulder there at all.]