I watched as Dry Grass set up the room for this smaller conference. Without so many Odists, Jonases, Selenas, Debarres, Marshans, and however many others, there was no need for the presentation setup, and so those tables that had been set up before the stage were instead joined together. Dry Grass released them from their stolidly stationary positions and pushed them together. Merging like drops of mercury, the dozen or so smaller tables became one large circle. This was then corralled with gentle tugs of her hands to a much smaller shape, remaining a perfect circle. Chairs trailed after the edge of the table like eager puppies, merging together in similar fashion whenever crowding grew too great.
The next change was to the square platform of the AVEC stage. The light-gray material that made it up was similarly shrunk down with nudges from her foot. The table was given a gentle push so that it settled just over the edge of the stage.
I'd had little to do with sim manipulation beyond simply expanding or reducing bounds, and almost nothing to do with object manipulation beyond pulling items off the exchange. That had always been Hanne's game, and while I'd watched her work plenty, it had never been so casually exhausted as Dry Grass's manipulation here. She worked with such surety, such tiredness on her face, that her age seemed all the more evident. Of course someone more than three centuries old, someone who had spent nearly all of that time here on the System, would be able to move through this world with such ease.
"Alright," she said, flumping down into one of the chairs across from the AVEC stage. "I think we are all here. While I would obviously prefer you stay, it is not a requirement. If you need to duck out, feel free to do so. We are just waiting on Günay and we can get going."
About twenty people had shown up. It didn't seem to be twenty clades — there were two Odists, after all, with Dry Grass and another from the eighth stanza, Why Ask Questions When The Answers Will Not Help — but the audience remained diverse. Only about half appeared to be human of some sort, with the Marshans, Odists, and Jonases accounting for most of those. I suppose it made sense, given the Odists' social circle, but that didn't quite tally with what I knew of Jonas's role in the leadership of the System. He didn't strike me as a furry.
When asked over a sensorium message, Dry Grass replied, *"The eighth stanza has been slowly tamping down on Jonas's role over the years. He has not been nearly as grounded as he once was."* She cast a slight smile in my direction, adding, *"Too singularly focused, perhaps. All work and no play makes Jonas go fucking batty."*
I stifled a laugh. It probably shouldn't have been funny, but the absurdity of the comment clashed just right with the mirrored absurdity of the situation. Probably best not to laugh in front of everyone.
Just in time, too, as there was a polite chime from the location of the AVEC stage, and Günay faded into being. She was clearly sitting at her own table far different from ours, but some trick of the AVEC software quickly scaled her to the point where it looked as though she was sitting there with us. The opacity was even turned all the way up so that she was just as present as the rest of the attendees.
"Hey friends," she said, waving. "Wasn't expecting an invitation for just me."
Answers Will Not Help gave a hint of a bow without standing. Her voice seemed to sit just shy of laughter, though whether that was a laughter was teasing or convivial was difficult to say. "What can we say? We like you." She waved around the table. "We have a group of representatives from a variety of clades. I think you met a good chunk of us yesterday, yes?"
Günay nodded. "Yep. At least, I remember Dry Grass and Jonas and Debarre and Selena." Her eyes darted around those seated at the table, likely reading through name tags. "Answers Will Not Help...I've heard your name, at least."
"Right, I bet you have," Answers Will Not Help said with a smirk. "We are a notorious group, yes? For those you have not met, we have selected a group of clades among friends who we believe to be both good people and representative of the various ways we have been affected."
The systech nodded again. "Alright."
"Reed and Sedge of the Marsh clade lost their root instance, a loss of 14%. We Odists have lost 2% of our number, including two lines of the Ode and two long-lived up-tree instances. The Jonas clade has lost approximately 3% of their number. Andréa C. Mason and Harvey of the CERES clade have been hit particularly hard," she said, gesturing to an anthropomorphic coyote and goat across the table, "with Andréa's subclade losing 99.983% of their number, totalling 69,760 instances destroyed."
There was a long moment of silence before Günay whispered, "What the fuck."
Answers Will Not Help continued smoothly. "Debarre, on the other hand, lost zero instances for a total of 0%. Obvious, yes, but I believe that will do well to illustrate the apparent random nature of this event from our end, yes?"
Günay nodded, expression lingering in shock even as the Odist continued around the table with introductions and percentages lost.
"Günay," Jonas Fa said once this had wrapped up. "Jakub and I had a pleasant little chat and, if you'll cheek, you'll see that NDAs have been lifted."
She frowned, blinked a few times, then said cautiously, "Okay."
"He also confirmed that this was an intentional attack on Lagrange. Some sort of widespread CPV event."
Silence fell around the table. Each of us processed this in our own way, whether that was the shock from the clades who had just been roped into the meeting to the exhaustion on Dry Grass's face, the wariness on Günay's features to the almost smug satisfaction in Jonas's. He looked to be almost purring, as though springing this information on everyone present was a joy in its own right.
"So, now that NDAs have been listed and we've torn Mr. Strzepek a new one," he continued after a moment. "Can you tell us what happened?"
"Uh...hold on," Günay said hoarsely. She reached out of view of the AVEC recorder to grab a bottle of water, taking a long drink. She seemed to be buying time, organizing her thoughts, consulting her HUD. "Promise you won't tear me a new one?"
I was caught off guard by the humor, but many of the others around the table chuckled.
"I will promise no such thing," Answers Will Not Help said, giggling.
Dry Grass elbowed her in the side. "Do not listen to her, my dear. She is a snot. You are fine, my dear. No tearing, promise."
The systech chuckled nervously, nodding. "Well, alright. Then yeah, Jonas has it. As far as we can tell, there was a sort of CPV bomb set off right at midnight on New Year's Eve, 2399 — or 2400; I can never remember which one gets midnight — which caused a full crash of all instances in less than ten seconds. With the crash, there was a spike in resource usage and then a precipitous drop."
"I'm still confused about that," Debarre said. "I thought CPV had to be tailored to a single instance or any of their forks that hadn't individuated much. How is it someone was able to blast the whole System?"
"We didn't understand it either. Hell, we didn't really understand how CPV worked up until recently. It *shouldn't* work. It shouldn't even be possible in the first place." Günay made a few gestures, doubtless reorganizing some notes in her HUD. "But whatever. Someone figured it out well enough to generalize it and took out everyone on Lagrange."
"And who is this 'someone'?" Selena asked. "The phys-side feeds are being ungated, but it's a firehose of information to sort through to try and find anything of use."
"Yeah, I think they — The System Consortium — clamped down pretty tight. I'm just learning about this myself, since I just got access to the files a few hours ago. Let's see..." She frowned, continued in the tone of someone reading aloud, "Okay. The Our Brightest Lights Collective claimed responsibility for the attack exactly thirty seconds *before* it occurred via a message to every executive on the System Consortium board, as well as several major feeds, all of which were censored before being made public. The OBLC named the mechanism, provided a detailed timeline of events, and offered a list of names of individuals — or "individuals", I guess — and their roles in the execution of this plan. All one hundred members of the collective have been apprehended, though in the past year, two have managed to end their own lives."
Answers Will Not Help spoke up during a break in the recitation. "Is there more information on this collective? Are they conservatives? How tight is their integration? Do they mimic clades like the old-style collectives?"
"Oh, uh, one moment, I'll look that up once I'm finished," Günay said. "It goes on to say that, through investigation, members from several other collectives were implicated and were also detained. During one of the System restarts between the Century Attack, as we've been calling it, and now, this information was confirmed by having an investigator sys-side fork rapidly to gather information and take action where needed. They were provided with emergency global ACLs and, once they found the perpetrator, they locked them in an unpopulated airlocked implementation of the System."
"The System was restarted more than once?" Debarre asked, taken aback.
She nodded. "About thirty times, I think. We had three shifts working on it for more than a year, remember. We just rolled memories back each time."
"But wouldn't the bomb or whatever just go off again every time?"
"It did the first two times, yeah," Günay said with a shrug. "Until we patched out the CPV vulnerability."
"Well, yeah, we kind of had to, otherwise we'd either have to reconstruct everyone with a memory of crashing, or the same thing would keep happening every time the perpetrator was reconstructed. It took us a good four months of total System downtime working all three shifts to get it done."
Jonas Ko, one of the two Jonases sitting at the table, had been steadily frowning more and more through the conversation, resting his chin on folded hands. Finally, he sat up straight and looked to Answers Will Not Help. "Hey, can I?"
The Odist let out a groan and kneaded the heels of her palms against her eyes for a moment before leaning back in her chair. "Fuck it. Why not? Might as fucking well."
Both forked, and the up-tree instances stepped around the table to face each other. Jonas Ko summoned up a small pocket knife, explaining as he did so. "So, if you've read any of the scandalous works about us, you can probably guess that we all have CPV mixed up for each other. It's nothing as grand as the stories make it sound like, though; just a way for us to keep each other in check and occasionally play around."
Before anyone had a chance to ask any further questions, he swiped out with the knife, catching Answers Will Not Help in the cheek, leaving a gash that quickly welled up with blood. There was no noise from the Odist for a few moments before she finally let out a shaky breath, sounding almost content.
There was, notably, no crashing. She simply dabbed at her cheek, inspected the blood on her fingertips, grinned wildly to Jonas, and said, "Oh, we are *so* fucked," and then quit, followed shortly by the second Jonas.
Günay, like many of the rest of us, had pushed herself away from whatever table she had been sitting at, looking horrified at the casual violence before her. "What the fuck?" she whispered, eyes wide.
"There is still an outstanding conversation about this collective, Günay," the remaining instance of Answers Will Not Help said breezily. "Can you tell us more about them?"
The systech stared, mouth open, for a moment, then slowly pulled herself back to her desk. "Uh...right," she mumbled, hiding some complex emotion by taking another long drink of water. "The OBLC describe themselves as fundamentalists, in the sense of returning humanity to its fundamentals, and pride themselves on very tight integration."
"'Integration'?" Debarre asked, tilting his head, a particularly animalistic gesture on his musteline features. "I haven't kept up on collectives at all. Don't make any sense to me."
"Groups of people who aim to live as a hive-mind of sorts," Selena explained. "They use tech from their implants to force alignment in ideals, or even just nudge complete thoughts into place for everyone. It's almost a religious thing for them."
"It *is* a religion thing for many," Answers Will Not Help added. "The ideals they try to live into tend to be high-minded conceptualizations of God or life or the way things 'should' be. It used to be that they would try to mimic clades in terms of structure, but their idea of what a clade was is batshit insane."
Selena nodded, picking up once more. "The clade analogy was far more common before AVEC. Answers Will Not Help asking that is a way of asking "are they old and batty or young and insane?""
Günay, who had been watching the explanation with something akin to amusement, said, "A lot of that is borne out of just not having a clue how things work, sys-side. I'm a systech, and you don't make sense to me at all."
"Goes both ways, trust me," Debarre said, laughing. "None of this makes sense to me, either, but then I'm the second oldest person in the room."
She grinned, nodding. "Well, even if you don't make any sense, I still like you all."
"We like you, too, Günay," Dry Grass said, stretching her arms over her head. "It is nice to have someone who is not just trying to keep the bureaucratic definition of peace to talk to. Those conversations are for Jonas and Debarre and so on."
"Unfortunately," Debarre murmured.
"I would like to return to the topic of us still being alive people," she continued, smirking at the weasel. "So the System was restarted thirty or so times in the year-and-change we do not remember. CPV was patched out entirely. A collective tried to kill 2.3 trillion people. We are only just now getting access to extrasystem communications. What have Castor and Pollux been told about this?"
"Right," Günay said, sitting up straighter. "We told them at first that there was a communications issue, and then expanded on that later, once the scale became evident. We said that there had been a massive outage at the Lagrange station, that there were no deaths or anything, but that Lagrange itself was down."
"And what did they say?"
"Well, it's hard to have a conversation with people almost four months away," she hedged. "So I guess we drip-fed information over time. I don't know the specifics; I really am just a systech."
Dry Grass smiled kindly. "Of course, Günay. What did they say in return?"
"To us? A lot of panicked messages requesting as many updates we could give them. Of course, by then, the messages were eight months out of date, and we'd been sending them daily updates on the status of Lagrange for quite a while. They were broken down into buckets based on content: personal, political, technical, and vague threats." She smiled wryly. "I only really know all of that because I was privy to the technical bucket. SERG on both of the LVs activated in force and started throwing ideas at us as fast as they could. They were mostly not of help, given the delay, but some of them helped. They brought casualties down from 15%."
> ANDRÉA CHECK
I started to do the math in my head, but Harvey blurted out, "345 *billion!* Holy shit! You've gotta be fucking kidding me."
Günay shrugged helplessly. "We were doing the best we could from phys-side. They had the benefit of being sys-side, and also working without phys-side intervention for like...seventy-five years, you know?"
Shaking his head, Harvey mumbled, "Still, that's fucking wild."
"Were there any other changes that were made?" Dry Grass asked. "You patched out CPV, learned plenty more about instance recovery, managed to turn back memories for trillions of people..."
"Yeah, uh...there's a whole laundry list, one second."
We waited as patiently as we could while the systech tallied up various changes.
*"I cannot believe it has taken them this long to patch out CPV,"* Dry Grass sent Sedge and I.
*"That's the one that got a bunch of your cocladists, right?"* I asked.
*"Well, 'got' is perhaps not a great word for it. Qoheleth was assassinated using CPV loaded into a syringe and a hundred or so instances of Sasha, back when she was True Name, were murdered by Jonas,"* she sent. *"But also it is something that some of us have used intentionally for various reasons. Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled, our very weird instance artist, included it quite often in its exhibitions, and What Gifts We Give We Give In Death tried using it in some games they were designing, but it was seen as too transgressive and was roundly shut down."*
Sedge stifled a giggle beside me. *"You guys are* all *weird, love."*
Dry Grass smiled proudly over at us. *"And you love it, my–"*
She cut off as Günay cleared her throat. "Alright, I have a list of changes", she said, and began reading off a list that appeared in translucent letters against the front of the AVEC stage area. "CPV was patched out; ACL permissions were hardened for sim isolation, allowing for locking cladists *in* sims as well as out of them; storage was optimized; some physical components were replaced, no clue which; AVEC improvements; Ansible improvements; merging improvements; and SERG tools refined. There's a slew of others we're waiting on confirmation from you all before implementing: improvements to perisystem clade listing that would provide better statistics on who all is extant, which I guess has privacy ramifications; a solution for splitting the physical components of the System hardware was successfully tested, but that will mean production and deployment time, as well as downtime; limited per-sim Artemis-style skew; and some political tools to reduce anarchy."
"'Reduce *anarchy?'*" Jonas Fa said, snorting. "Fuck off with that."
She held up her hands defensively. "Hey, like I said, it's just a change, and I'm just a tech."
"I am sorry, Günay," Dry Grass said. "You are right that that is a conversation for another time. Tell us about these ACL improvements and merging improvements? Those are likely to be the most relevant to everyone here."
"Right," she said, frowning. "Well, the ACL improvements allow locking cladists within sims. We needed this to contain the perpetrator, but left it in place. We came up with a suggested protocol, though, that would mean a two step approval process — phys-side and sys-side — as well as mandatory waiting period. It's disabled for now, but we can re-enable it whenever.
"The merge improvements involve finer-grained conflict management, which is more just an efficiency thing; we're told nothing changed subjectively. We also enabled cross-tree merging."
"It seemed like it wouldn't be that big of a deal."
"It really fucking is," Answers Will Not Help said, and despite the hint of joviality that seemed permanently lodged in her tone, her expression was frighteningly serious. "Especially if there is no limit on how far diverged the cross-tree instances are."
"There isn't, no," Günay said cautiously. "Why's it a big deal?"
"Shitloads of reasons," Jonas Ko said. "It changes the nature of a clade a way from a strict tree to a cloud, a gestalt. Have you published this anywhere yet?"
She shook her head.
"Good. Don't."
"Uh...alright," Günay said. "I'll bump that up to admin, though. I don't have control over that."
"Alright. I'll tear Jakub another one, then," Jonas Ko said, smirking.
Günay winced. "Glad I'm not on admin," she mumbled. "Is there anything else, though? I gotta get back to work. Shame, I like you all more than work."
"We like you too," Dry Grass said, smiling. "If you ever want to upload, you have a place up here set for you."
"I may have to before long. I like you guys, but you've made my life hell with admin," she said, laughing.
"Well, you'll have a place on SERG," Harvey said, grinning lopsidedly. "If you're not sick of dealing with this shit, that is."
Once we'd made our goodbyes and the AVEC call had ended, we sat in silence for nearly a minute. Finally, Sedge said, "Well, holy shit."
Laughter around the table.
"Holy shit, indeed, love," Dry Grass said, scooting her chair closer to rest her head on Sedge's shoulder. "I need a fucking nap."
