In those first months after we moved, when Umis was out rioting and I was mostly hiding in my room, I tried to get into making clip-ops, like the famous ones, but I wasn’t any good at it.

Then I got into storytelling.

I don’t know how much you know about storytelling. Some people’s agents don’t seem very well informed about the topic. Some people think it’s just “lying about strangers” and find it shocking.

Storytelling is like a clip-op or show of famous people . . . but a clip-op of things that never happened, and instead of feed-footage, you have words. Like, you tell a story of what the famous people would do or could have done, but you’re just making it up.

People do it in the secret spaces in the world-of-ideas that rogue feedgardeners have started setting up.

Here’s the thing: for kids my age, one of our biggest early memories is the feed going down. And we live in a time when you never know when the feed will go out . . . maybe for an hour, maybe for a week; maybe just in your habitation, maybe all over the world. This is a big trauma for us kids, and a big way we’re different than older people. It’s affected us in a way older people will never really understand, because they had the feed their whole lives, until recently. For them, it’s a big problem when the feed goes out, and it freaks them out completely . . . but they also all believe it’s a temporary problem. They’re sure someone will fix it and things will go back to normal soon.

But for us, it is normal. Maybe it will get fixed for a while . . . but not forever. We can’t count on the feed. We feel like sooner or later it will go back to broken.

When the feed is out, and someone tells you something they see in another body, you have no way of checking for yourself. They could be lying; you just have to trust them. It could be true, or not. Anything could be real.

That’s life for us. Kids my age know that “the truth” is always just a story someone’s telling you.

So, while I hid in my room, and the world fell apart, I started posting to the world-of-ideas with stories about Fift and Shria.

Now, I think it is important to address the topic of romance in storytelling. This is one big thing people get mad about.