<p>There was a strange sort of distance involved with my life as a cladist, just by virtue of the ways in which my world worked. It was a constant, something that I’d noticed shortly after uploading, something that had stuck with me ever since. It shouldn’t be the case that I would feel distance from what I was doing just because a fork was off doing something else in my stead, right? I would be getting all of their memories, after all. Everything they experienced would be come something that I would experience, too.</p>
<p>And the memories here on the System were something far more than what they were back phys-side. Yes, they were imperfect: they collected the same sorts of impressions, attached the same amount of meaning and emotion to time and place. They were eternal, though. I could browse back through the life that I’d lived as Reed and as Marsh before that and pull together as exact a picture of what had happened as though it had happened only some hours ago.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, there was a distance that came with experiencing two things at once. If I sent out a tracking fork to, say, go on an exploratory date with someone that I’d accidentally developed feelings for through an ill advised merge while both our down-tree instances attended a meeting with phys-side in the middle of the apocalypse, intellectually, I wouldn’t expect that I, as the down-tree, would feel some sort of distraction from the meeting at hand, as though I were looking over the shoulder of someone else. I wouldn’t expect that I would feel like I was living two lives at once, because that was specifically what forking was used for, right? It let us live two lives at once and yet still feel singular about the whole thing.</p>
<p>But here I was, confronted with the very real sense of distance I was feeling from this conversation between the representative sample of clades and phys-side, forcing me to consciously focus on paying attention.</p>
<p><em>Or maybe I’m just anxious,</em> I thought.</p>
<p>The topic of the conversation certainly had its share of anxiety-inducing power. We’d gathered once more in the room with the AVEC stage, finding our seats around the oblong table that had long since started to become familiar, while Günay and Jakub joined us from the L<sub>5</sub> station.</p>
<p>Need An Answer once more called the meeting to order, though with no new faces, this largely amounted to her stating that she had a list of topics that we wished to address and picking one to start with.</p>
<p>“When last we spoke about the perpetrator, 8-stanza-1, it was stated that they were locked in the DMZ for the time being,” she said. “Are we able to speak with them ourselves?”</p>
<p>Günay shook her head. “The DMZ is currently offline.”</p>
<p>Most of those sys-side stared blankly. Harvey, meanwhile, laughed. “What the fuck does that mean?”</p>
<p>“Oh! The DMZ can be completely isolated, right? That was what they wanted for the launch vehicles. That means that we can also bring it up and down just like the System as a whole.”</p>
<p>“Terrifying,” he said cheerfully. “Thanks.”</p>
<p>Günay, looking baffled, asked, “Why’s that terrifying?”</p>
<p>“Have they been brought back online with this start-up?”</p>
<p>She shook her head.</p>
<p>“So there’s this person who’s effectively dead, right? You can bring them back to life, presumably stuck in a default sim, and they’re going to immediately go crazy because they’re suddenly all alone fifteen minutes before their plan was to go down,” he continued, ticking points off on his fingers. “CPV doesn’t work, they can’t quit, their plan was only 1% successful — if you even decide to tell them that! — and it actually made Lagrange loads safer with fixes and new features. Oh, and don’t forget, literally trillions of people hate them now.”</p>
<p>Günay looked helplessly over to Jakub, who nodded. “That’s an ongoing conversation to be had sys-side,” he said, sounding as though he was choosing his words very carefully. “We can bring the DMZ back up whenever you would like, and you will retain full control over transit to and from the DMZ–”</p>
<p>“Can you prevent 8-stanza-1 from entering the rest of Lagrange?” Debarre asked. “I’m with Harvey in that it’s kinda terrifying, but I also don’t exactly want them over here, either.”</p>
<p>Jakub bowed. “That’s already been implemented, though if you want to lift it in the future, you will need to consult with phys-side. For this reason and for our sake, I’d like to ask that you keep us — phys-side and the System Consortium — up to date with whatever decisions you make regarding the DMZ and 8-stanza-1.”</p>
<p>Debarre shrugged. Harvey scoffed. Jonas Ko grinned, leaning back in his seat, saying, “Sure thing, Jakub.”</p>
<p>After a moment’s uncomfortable pause, Need An Answer asked, “What can you tell us about the CPV device?”</p>
<p>Günay, who had been slouching further and further down in her seat as the discussion had drifted away from the technical, sat up straight once more. “It was one of those things that was really clever and all the worse for it,” she said. “They uploaded a few months before the attack and went out to big public sims and met a bunch of people. When they set the bomb off, it hit them first, but before it did, it used their access to the perisystem clade listing to look up everyone they’d interacted with to go infect them and their cocladists after looking up everyone <em>they</em> knew about, and so on. This would have gotten more than 99% of the System, especially once it hit the new upload assistants, who have probably met more people than anyone else, including those who never talked to anyone else, sys-side. Once the number of uninfected cladists fell below a threshold — I think five billion? — the clade listing allowed access to a full listing of everyone sys-side, and the virus just mopped up from there.”</p>
<p>“What was that threshold even for?” Selena asked. “I thought it was part of the privacy policy that no one be able to just look up everyone on the System.”</p>
<p>“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “It was all super old code. My guess is that it was leftover from the first few years of the perisystem architecture.”</p>
<p>Dry Grass nodded. “I remember when we were able to look up everyone sys-side. We used to do it to see if anyone we recognized had uploaded in the last week.”</p>
<p>“And they did all of this in a few months?” Need An Answer said, gently steering the conversation back on track.</p>
<p>Jakub shook his head. “We don’t think so. They were the only one from Our Brightest Lights to upload, but they had the rest of OBLC working with them, plus a dozen other collectives and some individuals besides. I don’t know the specifics, but I imagine it took them well over a year to organize everything while still keeping it under wraps.”</p>
<p>“That much work, though, and they can’t have had just one person working sys-side,” Debarre said, brow furrowed in a frown. “Are you sure they’re the only one out of all those collectives and people that uploaded? Wouldn’t they have to have sympathizers and so on here?”</p>
<p>“We are working on it,” I Cannot Stop Myself From Speaking, who had until this point in the meeting been silent, replied. The bobcat’s expression remained impassive, but it was hard to miss just how sharp her fangs were with the anger evident in her voice. I was happy to see that she at least looked away from Debarre as she said this; the anger seemed instead to be directed at no one in particular, or perhaps the world as a whole. A world that would permit such people to exist. It was an anger that veered well into vindictiveness.</p>
<p>Need An Answer, perhaps sensing the tension this inspired, moved smoothly down her list. “The next point that we would like to discuss is the sentiment that has crept into the System based on the news of an attack. I must admit that we found it frustrating to hear just how much phys-side knew in comparison to what we had been told. Günay said, “There is some suspicion of malicious actors, yeah. I say ‘suspicion’ in earnestness, I promise.” Mr. Strzepek stated that certain data were to be withheld from both sys-side and phys-side.” A smile, condescending, curled the corner of her mouth. “And here we learn that news of the attack was released some weeks ago, phys-side.”</p>
<p>Günay wilted in her chair, looking down at her desk, wherever she sat.</p>
<p>Jakub, on the other hand, sat stock still for several long seconds. “Yes,” he said at last. “During the briefing prior to our first meeting, we were instructed that anyone who was asked were to say those words specifically. They were displayed in our HUDs.”</p>
<p>Answers Will Not Help rolled her eyes. “Tacky.”</p>
<p>“I suppose I ought to thank you for telling me the fucking truth after,” Jonas Ko said cheerily. “Good on you, Jakub! Perhaps there <em>is</em> a bone in your body, even if it isn’t your spine.”</p>
<p>The admin bristled at the insult, visibly forcing himself back to calmness before he continued. “You’ll remember that I also said we were maintaining information hygiene.”</p>
<p>“Oh! Of course, you’re right. And whose idea was that?”</p>
<p>“Shut up, Jonas,” Answers Will Not Help said fondly, preempting any response.</p>
<p>“Needless to say,” Need An Answer said, “the response sys-side has been fraught. SERG <!--TODO--> had to throttle several of the main feeds after complaints that it had become an impossibly dense flow of information. There is grief. There is panic. There are calls for heads, ours <em>and</em> yours.”</p>
<p>“We’ve been shaping the sentiment as best we can,” Selena said. “But it would’ve been far easier if this had been a coordinated effort. As it is, we are keeping the anger and panic to tolerable levels and steering cladists towards grief.”</p>
