Talking with Remote helped. Knowing there was someone else going through the same things helped, even though they never explicitly discussed it. Remote seemed so normal and together. That salved her. If that’s how normal and together Dis looked from the outside then she was probably holding it together, too. Remote was a sort of mirror. What she saw in it was reassuring.
She helped with party preparations, kept track of the goings-on in Thetford’s great hall, watched the weather, conversed with spacies and worked on cluster optimization and predictive modeling for the constraints they’d apply to each model in storage when they brought them up in their own sims. Working with CC’s sim was educational and scary. She’d envied CC his even keel, but in his digital afterlife, he was a mess. He was worse than she’d ever been. Walkaways all over the world collaborated with her.
She worried—without feeling worried—about her friends in the snow. There’d been no stable network connectivity for five hours. Last she’d heard, they’d departed from Dead Lake. They were now two hours overdue. The microwave masts outside the space-station sporadically caught distant threads of network signal, enough for the routers to start trading zone files and synchronizing clocks and getting the latest meteorology and frequency-hopping norms, only to fade off in an unrecoverable cascade of packet-loss and blown checksums.
Walkaway net was different from default’s. Its applications were designed for fault tolerance—built with the assumption the machine you connected to could disappear and reappear without warning, as drones, towers, wires, and fibers failed, faded, or fubared. It assumed it was being wiretapped, under permanent infowar conditions. It insisted on handshakes, signatures, and signed nonces to root out man-in-the-middlers. When Dis went from Stanford to Walkaway U, the network had been the biggest culture shock. Slower in some ways, but without the ubiquitous warnings about copyright infringement, interminable clickthrough agreements, suspicious blackouts of “sensitive” resources when global protests spiked.
She lived on walkaway networks. She appreciated the subtle genius in its architectures. Sites that had became unreachable sprang back to life thanks to the questing tendrils of the network’s self-healing, restlessly seeking out new ways to bridge the parts that were atomized by entropy or connivance. The downside was that nothing was ever truly down, and anything unreachable warranted a reload. It didn’t work, but sometimes it did, often enough to keep trying. Dis hadn’t thought about BF Skinner since her undergrad days, but after the millionth retry to reach Seth, Tam, and Gretyl, she looked up “intermittent reinforcement” in their locally cached wikip. That’s what it was: intermittent reinforcement. Give a pigeon a food pellet every time it presses a button and it’ll press it when it’s hungry. Change the lever’s algorithm so it randomly drops a pellet and the pigeon will peck and peck, as the pattern-matching parts of its brain sought to figure out the trick of a reliable jackpot.
She was disconcerted to learn that being a disembodied consciousness didn’t immunize her from such a cheap cognitive trick. Not for the first time, she thought about tinkering with her parameters. Other Dises in other places had done that, under better controlled conditions, with some success. It was so unfair to be subject to this kind of cognitive frailty. Reload reload reload. In fact, reload, she was especially susceptible to it, reload, which was so unfair—
She drew up short. The big tower had contact with another tower, in the mountains, with line of sight to a fiber downlink, and data flowed. Nothing that reached her friends, but huge swaths of walkaway space came online. Cachers negotiated to opportunistically copy off great slices of it for local access, salting it away against the next electronic famine. All over the world, waystation machines with packets destined for Thetford knocked on its doors, seeking permission to hand off their payloads.
Amidst it was the news. It brought Dis up short. Every filter she had on the raw feeds was going fucking crazy.
It was Akron. They’d cheered Akron on as walkaways consolidated their position, using printed health care and food as a calling card for their neighbors: diehard Akronites who couldn’t or wouldn’t vacate the dead city. They’d reveled in videos and casts of Akronites doing the unthinkable, establishing a permanent walkaway city, something you couldn’t walk away from, with permaculture farms and free-for-all white bikes and free schools where kids learned to teach each other and to be taught by other walkaway kids all over the world.
There’d been bad stuff. It was impossible to tell how much of that was propaganda. Akron had already been full of walkaways and semi-walkaways, throwing Communist parties and opening squats. It had been full of gangs and bad dope, pimps and scared people. Since Akron went walkaway, every murder and beat-down in Akron was top-of-feed news for every service in default, though violence and diseases hadn’t attracted attention in the ten years when Akron had been turning into Akron—even its bankruptcy and the appointment of a zotta “administrator” to replace the lame-duck mayor hadn’t rated particular mention. Akron was the fortieth American city to end up in that situation, and it wasn’t the biggest, or most violent, or most fucked up, so how was that news?
Default’s few voices of critical thinking pointed this out, pointed out Ohio had stopped keeping stats on the murder rate and overall mortality in Akron four years before, and back then, it had been five times higher than now, best anyone could figure.
When she saw a shit-ton of bad Akron news, she spacebarred it into ignoreland, but it kept popping up, and the headlines got snaggier and gnarlier and she couldn’t help herself, she read one. Then another. Then she watched videos the cachers had already pulled down and made local copies of, because every feed in Thetford was losing its mind over Akron.
Default had marched on Akron: the US Army and a ton of private “contractors” in the vanguard, riding mechas or ground-effect vehicles with drone outriders that continuously scanned for IEDs with lidar and millimeter-wave and backscatter, emblazoned with radiation trefoils in safety orange on their bellies, more to scare than to fulfill any safety remit.