Entry 26: 12 Poråkol 1865

Epiphany

Liga, will you call me?

Aneti asked me if I ate dinner last night at the docks. I told lim that I went out with family and friends. Le already knows about the family satellite home, so I showed lim some of the photos I took of Gyetsuk and ler fiancé. Aneti accepted the account, but I saw something in ler eyes. Perhaps you were right. I should not have gone because now Aneti suspects that I am lying about something.

Giving the excuse made my heart beat fast even though I had prepared my answer on the Skyrail train this morning. Ler eyes narrowed and le looked up from the historical novel le was reading, something popular and classy. Ler jaw set, but le didn’t say anything. I didn’t mention Kitesrati. Of course, it’s expected for me to date now that I am no longer in mourning, but all the same, Aneti frightens me. I look into ler eyes and think, This woman is participating in an assassination plot. How could someone like that be so nice?

Akah Kara wanted me to query things related to Code 1830-229-17. We have a Progressive Movement-affiliated politician willing to weaken the Code by adding an addendum to surveillance legislation in the Senate. Le wouldn’t tell me who, but I have a feeling that it is one of my cousins. I mean, we don’t discuss their legislative projects at the family breakfast table — I don’t know. The computer made a beeping noise seven times before it shut itself down, but I don’t think the power cut completely.

I had this sense that the video camera had activated itself. Can those watch people when a machine isn’t on? I unplugged it and plugged it back in?

When I redid the searches, I printed them out. The computer was so slow and glitchy. It reminded me of the first Atarahi import store I walked into two years ago. Kelis was with me. We tried out one of the thought-controlled computing devices and giggled the entire time because haptic displays worked so much better. Le used translation software to talk to the vendor instead of asking me to translate. Kelis was always considerate like that.

Akah Kara made me scan and OCR the pages so le could read them on the screen. I went back to my workstation after finishing and slumped low in my chair. My work computer kept losing its connection to the network. I rebooted it three times.

I sent you a text with the computer’s network ID just in case you want to look at it.

For the rest of the day, I queried theatrical performances happening in the City Center because we have a few regional people coming in, and I will show them around the city. Guiding Light looks like a good option. The reviews say that it was done in the new style, which is a euphemism for High Wilds culture from either Maðz or Mntaka because the Shiji like those plays. Guiding Light is filled with staccato recitation rhythms and wailing voices that clash with its tonal percussion ensemble. Akah Kisetar, the best voice of the new style in Shiji theater, is considered visionary here. I think that le doesn’t do anything particularly revolutionary, at least not in comparison to our Narahji playwrights. I mean, I memorized some trivia.

Akah Narvasaluta has a play out in Menarka that I hope comes up here. It comments on the impact of technology in our daily lives, and le mentions epiphany in the context of an orgiastic union between the mechanical and the organic. So many people have called it blasphemous and posthumanist that it must have something interesting in it. Specialists are already putting implants in people doing space work. I could see that play happening in reality twenty or thirty years from now once mods become more mainstream.

I like Narahji theater better. The Narahji know how to use metaphors, symbols, and melodrama. The Shiji keep everything just so boring and realistic, just like their political speeches. If one knows what a politician will say, why not at least make the speech an interesting monologue? I don’t understand the Shiji. Sabaji. I don’t know — do the Galasuhi alone perform oratory with that minimalist style? It’s hard to tell the difference between them and the other cultural groups in Shija. The Iturji are even more oratorically dense than the ?gzarhjenya.

The computer problems made me anxious. Akah Kara asked me how I felt — not about the computer problems, but I think that le saw the stress in my face, so again— please call me! Le asked about other symptoms that presumably indicate the muakanua, and I shook my head.

The nuamua in Galasu keep an outreach center, according to Akah Kara, but I don’t know why I would ever go there. Karatau Meiyenesi may seem cordial, Deisurås may have the platonic heart of Gyetsuk, and Okiyot may have treated me with respect in my apartment, but how do I know that the ritual pollution that remains controversial in those twenty-three temples in Menarka and its environs doesn’t mean something real? How do I know that it stops at the nuamua? Has an oracle argued for the ritual purity of the Kohjenya?

Any of them could take photographs of ancestors’ ashes in household shrines to the dead. Any of them could have helped Namgyatzi dishonor Seh?nta. If Okiyot was alive when Seh?nta made the exception for Karatau Meiyenesi, what does that mean about Okiyot? I’ve read so many stories on the network fora.

What would be the purpose of going to an outreach center to have someone tell me it’s in my head? I don’t need to seek any of them out.

Liga, I want to see the photographs that Deisurås mentioned, and I would like you to enhance the ones I just put on my tablet for you. Thank you.