Folio Two, Page Thirty-Nine (svegra mos bietkron tal-tusjga)

No one noticed me slip through the kitchen door. The house had fallen quiet, just like the woodlands after a big storm has swept through.

The first thing I did — after getting refreshment from the fridge because the AI didn’t care and I was famished — was to lock myself in my room and activate the wall screen. My aunt had locked out all of the brutal news, but I could still get some of the major stories and religious things without alerting her or asking someone over fifteen for permission.

It makes me sick with awe and horror to this day, seeing my mother’s face plastered everywhere. She looked so much like me when she was younger that I almost thought it was me plastered up there, except our eyes were different. I saw her in photos with other people from the Progressive Movement, old men long dead and young people now graying in prominent Movement positions, but the stories remained the same: Salus, our Mother of Narahja, is dead, but her spirit lives on.

They called her the Protector of Trains and Our Lady of Progress. The people had started calling her Maigyenezhai, Virgin Enthroned. My fingers trembled against the input and I almost felt like screaming.

If my mother had never had connections with men, it meant that I couldn’t exist. They had forgotten about me.

I sat down on the bed and scrunched my face up tight, but every now and then I peeked up at the news reports and saw something different. I screamed into a pillow to keep people from hearing and beat the mattress. The girl reflected in the mirror looked like a mad thing, a villain, her face all red and blotchy and unladylike. But I was through with being a lady in miniature.

Using the name dustmaiden22, I trolled every article related to the hysteria surrounding my mother and asked about her daughter. I went onto the two competing crowd-sourced encyclopedias, Volume and KnowThat, where I edited the page about my mother to include a small section about her daughter. When people flagged the changes two hours later, I even provided sources that almost everyone had overlooked: the music discovery article and the audio feed from the procession to the crematorium. If anyone argued with me, I yelled at them.

In short, I turned into a seven-year-old self-propagandist.

No one is more selfish than a seven-year-old girl fighting for her mother’s memory. An older child would have had self-control. She would have thought through her actions, ever mindful of the stress the complete revelation would give others. Perhaps she wouldn’t have tried to manipulate the system just because she could.

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