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<h1>Zk | 007</h1>
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<p>The day that followed that wine-soaked afternoon and evening was…well, I couldn’t say it was calm, <em>per se,</em> as we were all still coming to terms with the reality of what had happened, but it was certainly more level. The mood was low and Hanne and I were both laid low by crying jags at one point or another, but we doggedly stuck to our pre-catastrophe routine in an attempt to remain calm. It felt like we had few alternatives. We both felt powerless.</p>
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<p>The day that followed that wine-soaked afternoon and evening of half-obscured emotions was…well, I couldn’t say it was calm, <em>per se,</em> as we were all still coming to terms with the reality of what had happened, but it was certainly more level. The mood was subdued and Hanne and I were both laid low by crying jags at one point or another, but we doggedly stuck to our pre-catastrophe routine in an attempt to keep some semblance calm. It felt like we had few alternatives. We both felt powerless.</p>
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<p>Hanne holed up in her office for a while, working on some of her latest constructs. While the house had been littered with little <em>objets d’art</em> from her explorations, I’d requested that she stick to her office for working on this current trend of oneiro-impressionism. Something about the in-progress constructs hurt my eyes, and a few had led to migraines, even for her. Objects that brought the dream basis of the System into stark reality presented their own challenges.</p>
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<p>Meanwhile, I spent some time catching up on reading. I’d fallen into the hobby of literary analysis and critique some decades back, and it had become a habit of mine to post on the feeds. Over the years, I had picked up my own audience.</p>
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<p>I tried not to think about how much of that audience was missing.</p>
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<p>The only break from the norm, other than those few spates of emotional overwhelm, were the occasional updates from Sedge and Dry Grass. Many of these boiled down to simple numbers. The more the responses flowed in, the better the picture we got as to the extent of the damage to Lagrange.</p>
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<p>The news remained grim, as the total percentage of lost instances hit one percent and varied little.</p>
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<p>The news remained grim, as the total percentage of lost instances leveled out at one percent and varied little.</p>
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<p>Twenty-three billion dead.</p>
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<p>“Billion. With a ‘B’,” they wrote.</p>
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<p>The numbers boggled the mind. The percentage of my friends that had disappeared overnight remained well below: of the more than two hundred I checked in with, Benjamin was the only one missing. Even if I counted Marsh, the total number was less than that. Hanne tallied up similar results: Shu and one other, To Aquifer dos Riãos, could not be reached. They, like so many others, were unavailable to ping and listed as ‘no longer extant’ on the perisystem directory.</p>
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<p>The directory was a deliberately vague bit of software. It couldn’t provide a listing of all instances, couldn’t run aggregates on all of the data, wouldn’t provide a running tally on the number of instances living within Lagrange. One even needed permission to see more than a name, and that only if they were in the same sim.</p>
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<p>“It is both a technological and a social problem,” Dry Grass explained when asked. “The technology to provide that list would not be insignificant to implement, given some of the core mechanics of the System. We do not live in a database that can be queried so broadly. The social aspect is that we decided early on that we simply did not want that to be the case. We did not want that one would be able to discover random individuals, to hunt for old enmities on which to act. Privacy concerns here are of a different breed.”</p>
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<p>“It is both a technological and a social problem,” Dry Grass explained when asked. “The technology to provide that list would not be insignificant to implement, given some of the core mechanics of the System. We do not live in a database that can be queried so broadly. The social aspect is that we decided early on that we simply did not want that to be the case. We did not want that one would be able to discover random individuals, to hunt for old enmities on which to act. Privacy concerns here are of a different breed, and we leaned hard into more, rather than less, privacy early on.”</p>
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<p>Unsatisfying, but at least understandable.</p>
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<p>So we sat and did what we had done nearly every day for years and years now. Hanne tooled around with impossible shapes and colors that appeared different for every person, objects that couldn’t be discussed, while I read trashy novels and took notes in an exocortex.</p>
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<p>It wasn’t until well into the evening, dinner now simply crumbs on plates, that I decided to reengage with the overwhelming topic at hand. One half of me felt bad for having so thoroughly disengaged, while the rest felt blessedly refreshed, so maybe it hadn’t been in vain.</p>
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@ -41,7 +41,7 @@
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<p>“You look exhausted.”</p>
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<p>She nodded. “I am, but also I’m starting to feel numbed by all of this data, and it’s getting to me that that’s all I’m feeling. You and Dry Grass have talked about “Oh, I should be feeling X or doing Y!” and I’m starting to get that. I <em>am</em> doing Y, and it’s making me unable to feel X, if X is…I don’t know. Grief? Fear?”</p>
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<p>I frowned.</p>
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<p>“It’s not a bad thing,” she hastened to add. “So long as the goal is escapism. I’m sure it’ll catch up to me. Probably pretty soon.”</p>
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<p>“It’s not a bad thing,” she hastened to add. “So long as the goal is escapism, that is. I’m sure it’ll catch up to me. Probably pretty soon.”</p>
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<p>Hunting for an open chair to flop down into, I sighed. “Yeah, I get that. I think that’s what I wound up with. Just kind of alternating between feeling awful and then trying to do something other than feeling awful.”</p>
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<p>“Fair enough, yeah. What brings you around?”</p>
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<p>“I wanted to help¸ I guess.”</p>
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@ -58,7 +58,7 @@
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<p>“We’re hoping so. There’s been a few meetings so far, but they’ve been dragging their heels, supposedly to let us organize this Emergency Council or whatever they’re calling it. They don’t like the whole sys-side anarchy thing very much.”</p>
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<p>I shrugged. “I’ll send a fork, sure. Don’t want to leave Hanne in a lurch if she drinks too much and comes home a mess.”</p>
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<p>Sedge laughed. “Fair enough. You have good timing, though. It starts in…uh, five minutes, actually. Come on.”</p>
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<p>I stood up and forked, my root instance stepping back to the house while my new fork followed along after Sedge.</p>
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<p>I stood up and forked, my root instance stepping back to the house while my new fork followed along after Sedge — or at least one instance, her down-tree remaining in the chair, kneading her palms against her eyes.</p>
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<p>The headquarters room beyond the boundaries of Marsh’s study proved to be much larger than anticipated, stretching out to either side, where it was ringed with glass-walled conference rooms, many already populated with ‘politicians’, as Sedge had called them.</p>
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<p>“They’ve got a bunch of people working on different aspects of this. Jonas, of course, and a lot of the Odists — don’t tell Lily, but I’m starting to really like them — plus some folks from way back. The black guy is Yared Zerezghi, who wrote the secession amendment. The weasel is Debarre, who was on the Council of Eight. The blond woman–” She nodded over towards a huddle people matching that description. “–is Selena something-or-another. I never did catch her clade name. She seems neat, though. Ex-System Consortium. Well connected.”</p>
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<p>“So are you, seems like,” I said, grinning.</p>
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@ -74,7 +74,7 @@
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<p>Jakub’s expression grew even more sour, but he bowed once more and gestured toward the front row. A young-ish woman with short-cropped black hair stood, hesitated, and bowed. After an awkward moment and a gesture from Jakub, she stepped up to the front of the auditorium as well, holding a tablet to her chest.</p>
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<p>“Need An Answer, yeah?” she said, bowing once more. “Pleasure to see you. Dry Grass told me a lot about you.”</p>
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<p>“And she has told us much about you,” Need An Answer said, smiling. “Thank you for agreeing to join us. Those of us working on this project sys-side have requested that you be our primary point of contact moving forward. We have–”</p>
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<p>“<em>Me?</em>” Günay said, a look of panic washing over her face.</p>
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<p><em>“Me?”</em> Günay said, a look of panic washing over her face.</p>
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<p>“Yes, you,” Need An Answer said, voice calm. “You will be our primary point of contact among the phys-side systechs.”</p>
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<p>“But my boss–”</p>
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<p>“We do not want to speak with your boss on these matters,” she said, voice maintaining that eerie calm. “We wish to speak with you. Jakub Strzepek and the other members of the admin team have agreed after some…discussion. Thank you for joining us. We have a few questions that we would like to ask you directly. Your colleagues are there to provide guidance, and the representatives of the admin team are there to sate their curiosity.”</p>
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<p>“If I may,” Jakub said, glossing over the comment and continuing all the same. “It was determined that, with the conclusions produced by the investigative teams that dug into the root cause, certain data were to be protected by NDA and withheld from sys-side and phys-side <em>both.</em>“</p>
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<p>Jonas Fa smiled cloyingly. “I have to say, that doesn’t exactly leave much in the way of doubt in our minds as to what might’ve happened. You either fucked up royally or we were attacked.”</p>
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<p>Jakub stiffened, bowed, muttered, “Unavoidable.”</p>
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<p>One of the other Odists at our table snorted. “Treating information theory like a game gets you shit on every time.”</p>
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<p>One of the other Odists at our table, To Know God, snorted. “Treating information theory like a game gets you shit on every time.”</p>
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<p>After an uncomfortable pause, Günay asked meekly, “Is that okay for now? Maybe once the NDAs are lifted or whatever, we can talk more about that.”</p>
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<p>Dry Grass smiled again, more warmly this time. “Of course, my dear. Perhaps instead you can tell us what happened to the unrecoverable instances.”</p>
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<p>At this she brightened. “Oh! Yeah, for those, we just had the System remove the core dumps from the sims where they’d been dropped and instead placed them in one single sim where they wouldn’t be seen.”</p>
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<hr />
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</article>
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<p>Page generated on 2024-05-04</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2024-06-26</p>
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