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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>Dry Grass let out a surprised laugh. “Wait, you <em>patched out CPV?</em> 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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<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, followed shortly by the second Jonas.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>“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?”</p>
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<p>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.”</p>
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<p>“‘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.”</p>
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<p>“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.”</p>
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<p>“It <em>is</em> 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.”</p>
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<p>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?”“</p>
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<p>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.”</p>
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<p>“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.”</p>
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<p>She grinned, nodding. “Well, even if you don’t make any sense, I still like you all.”</p>
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<p>“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.”</p>
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<p>“Unfortunately,” Debarre murmured.</p>
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<p>“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?”</p>
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<p>“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.”</p>
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<p>“And what did they say?”</p>
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<p>“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.”</p>
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<p>Dry Grass smiled kindly. “Of course, Günay. What did they say in return?”</p>
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</article>
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<footer>
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<p>Page generated on 2023-12-01</p>
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