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<p>She frowned, blinked a few times, then said cautiously, “Okay.”</p>
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<p>“He also confirmed that this was an intentional attack on Lagrange. Some sort of widespread CPV event.”</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>“So, now that NDAs have been listed and we’ve torn Mr. Strzepek a new one, can you tell us what happened?”</p>
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<p>“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?”</p>
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<p>“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?”</p>
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<p>I was caught off guard by the humor, but many of the others around the table chuckled. </p>
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<p>“I will promise no such thing,” Answers Will Not Help said, giggling.</p>
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<p>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.”</p>
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<p>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.”</p>
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<p>“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?”</p>
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<p>“We didn’t understand it either. Hell, we didn’t really understand how CPV worked up until recently. It <em>shouldn’t</em> 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.”</p>
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<p>“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.”</p>
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<p>“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 <em>before</em> 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.”</p>
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<p>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?”</p>
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<p>“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.”</p>
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<p>“The System was restarted more than once?” Debarre asked, taken aback.</p>
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<p>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.”</p>
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<p>“But wouldn’t the bomb or whatever just go off again every time?”</p>
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<p>“It did the first two times, yeah,” Günay said with a shrug. “Until we patched out the CPV vulnerability.”</p>
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<p>Dry Grass let out a surprised laugh. “Wait, you patched out CPV entirely?”</p>
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<p>“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.”</p>
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<p>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?”</p>
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<p>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.”</p>
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<p>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.”</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>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 <em>so</em> fucked,” and then quit.</p>
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<p>Günay 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.</p>
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</article>
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<footer>
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<p>Page generated on 2023-11-30</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2023-12-01</p>
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@ -51,8 +51,8 @@
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<li class="done1"> Part 2 — Phys-side is being a little sketchy about what happened, turns out there was a reset and a lot of work behind the scenes after a coordinated attack between phys- and sys-side, taking the form of a generalized weapon that wiped out most of the System. Large chunks of it were restored after a lot of work and help from the Artemisians, but not total success — virus loophole was fixed (incl singular attacks), but no guarantee there won’t be another work-around, plans to split the System into smaller pieces, move some of them to Earth/Sun Lagrange points<ul>
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<li class="done2"> <a href="007.html">007</a> — Dry Grass loops Reed & co into discussion with phys-side engineers (halt called to the communication embargo between stanzas) Huddle to talk about why they’re being so cagey — 5747</li>
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<li class="done2"> <a href="008.html">008</a> — Talking with Dry Grass, Cress, and Tule about feelings — 3324</li>
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<li class="done1"> <a href="009.html">009</a> — Larger meeting with other representatives of clades with missing members, bit more info (loophole was patched, but no guarantee), introducing concept of splitting the System up, cross-clade merges, turns out someone was left with memories from a few previous attempts — (shorter to merge down)</li>
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<li class="done0"> <a href="010.html">010</a> — Clade representatives form a group, start organizing/strategizing/investigating, contacted by chill phys-side systech, learning even more about both what happened WRT CPV bomb and collectives, plus how phys-side is seeing things — (shorter to merge up)</li>
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<li class="done2"> <a href="009.html">009</a> — Larger meeting with other representatives of clades with missing members, bit more info (loophole was patched, but no guarantee), introducing concept of splitting the System up, cross-clade merges, turns out someone was left with memories from a few previous attempts — (shorter to merge down)</li>
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<li class="done1"> <a href="010.html">010</a> — Clade representatives form a group, start organizing/strategizing/investigating, contacted by chill phys-side systech, learning even more about both what happened WRT CPV bomb and collectives, plus how phys-side is seeing things — (shorter to merge up)</li>
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<li class="done0"> <a href="011.html">011</a> — Finding up-tree (or maybe down?) instance of person who caused the whole thing, seems super upset, promises they’re unable to contact that instance, but whether or not they’re telling the truth left up in the air</li>
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<li class="done0"> <a href="012.html">012</a> — Funeral for Marsh, though what if reconstructing?</li>
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</ul>
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</ul>
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</article>
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<footer>
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<p>Page generated on 2023-11-22</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2023-12-01</p>
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