I suppose I should explain about Bet H’aretz Ha Y’am. Not explaining my family makes it sound like I’m ashamed, like they’re as viciously maladaptive as Athëo’s parents. But really, it’s just that once I moved out, I was never able to work back up to the Bet’s overwhelming pace. In all honesty, I hadn’t always been able to keep to that pace when I lived there. There are a good two dozen adults in residence at any given point, plus kids—now the second generation to grow up there. My own parents were among the founders, along with several aunts and uncles and miscellaneous nominal relations. The walls and floors and screens declaim art and activism, radical cybersecurity and midnight poetry, scientific and spiritual and familial experiments outside the bounds of whatever institutions are currently in favor. If you’re not contributing to at least three of those things at once, you’re probably either sick or hyperobsessed with the immersive genderbending street production of The Maltese Falcon in mid-century Blackout-era costume that’s scheduled to kick off in less than a week. To give an example not quite at random. As I came in, I accidentally stepped on the mural-in-progress of a lantern-lit stormwater tunnel laid across half the common room. Against the concrete of the tunnel wall, period-style graffiti splashed a brilliant yellow dandelion.
“Aunt Judy don’t don’t don’t!” shouted Talia, and I made my way carefully around the rest of the props to scoop the seven-year-old into a hug. The waves of the Bet swept up to claim me.
Two costuming decisions, three requests to stand in for as-yet-unfinished scenery, several whispered mantras to avoid hyperventilating, and a hungry toddler later, I found my dad and eema in one of the side studios. Eema was swearing at a half-finished ukulele. She swore more when she saw it was almost sundown. (Bet standard time, which meant there was still a spark of light in the west if you squinted.) But she and Dad put down their chisels and hugged me, and we went together to collect Mom from the greenhouse. We joined the rest of the Bet’s Jewish contingent (only a portion of the house, despite the name) in the kitchen, where Aunt Adele lit the candles in their elaborate worked-iron holders, and sang the prayers in her gorgeous tenor with Eema providing descant. I wondered how Rhamnetin was reacting to our own ritual at home, and whether Mallory had stuck around for dinner, and whether they were looking on with the same sardonic smile they gave everything else.
After I was stuffed with parsnip soup and greenhouse salad and Dad’s famous experimentally significant beetroot cookies, I finally got my parents in a corner away from the chaos. Dori wriggled in Dad’s arms, warm and satisfied.
“So how are your new roly-poly friends?” he asked. “And the skittery ones?”
“Very technologically advanced. They like small babies, and Dinar’s jam, and taking apart gas giants to use as construction material. You must have been following the network traffic.”
“And keeping up with our own contributions,” said Mom, who’d helped moderate the early conceptual design discourse for the dandelion networks. “Whenever there’s been a network online to accept our ideas. But there’s nothing like being there in person.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t shown up to meet them,” I said quietly.
“We’re sure you’ve got it under control, dear,” said Eema.
“She’s been fretting all week,” clarified Dad. “But we’re sure you’ve got it under control. As a matter of policy.”
“I appreciate that.” And I did. Everyone in the Bet is constantly in everyone else’s headspace, but they mostly understood that if I’d wanted that, I would’ve stuck around. Not that they weren’t always eager for an invitation, which I was about to grant them. “I don’t have it under control. I need input.”
I told them about Asterion, and my fears about the Zealand visit: what the corporations wanted from the Ringers, why they’d dangled the trip at Dinar.
“Huh. Trying to be seductive, are they?” asked Eema thoughtfully. She’d stood in the lines that forced corporations to flatten their footprints or shut down entirely, using newborn SEED code to identify sites that would have the greatest impact.
You shouldn’t take from this that my parents are famous, or that there weren’t crowds of other people doing the same things they did. They came of age at the end of the era of big apes, and never tried to hold on to that kind of recognition. But they were among the hundreds of thousands who acted out of billions who couldn’t, or who didn’t want to, or who never heard about the movements until they were well underway. The whole Bet contributed their passion and time and overwhelming intensity to changing the world, at a time when the world was ready to change. They’re the people I know who were in the heart of the dandelion revolution and understood its tools, and who are always urging me to change more, and push harder on the changes in progress.
Dad cooed at Dori, his expression thoughtful. Mom and Eema waited for him to talk; he was the bard of the trio. “Asterion isn’t like the corporations we brought down. They’re what grew from the remnants after the workers dispersed, and the stocks turned back into autumn leaves, and the companies lost their cloak of personhood.
“The billionaire CEOs knew it was coming. They fantasized about the utopias and reactionary havens that they could set up when they’d lost everything else. They planned luxurious retreats with their closest employees and protectors. They asked researchers how to make those retreats stable, how to convince their guards to keep protecting them instead of taking over. The ones who succeeded—the aislands that didn’t fall to plague or revolution or Fly-lord Syndrome—were the seeds of today’s corporations. They’re built on the whims of dead men who believed they could do anything. The main thing they all have in common is that they value hoarding wealth and flaunting it, and that their ideas weren’t terrible enough to actually get them stabbed.”
I stood and paced. Ideas half-formed in scraps and shinies glinted from the walls; from above descended a mobile of silver gull wings, curves riding the draft of the Bet’s high ceilings. “They want to be relevant again. The Ringers could give them that. Room and resources and markets across a system of trillions, and then they come back to Earth with leverage to do whatever they feel like.”
“They want to be relevant,” he agreed. “And they don’t want to admit that they were wrong.”
I threw up my hands. (The Bet brings out my dramatic side.) “I don’t even know what gender they are! They won’t touch Dinar’s pronoun pins, after all the trouble she went to putting them out for the Ringers!”
“You know it’s none of your business if people don’t tell you, dear,” said Eema primly.
“They’re telling me, I assume. I just can’t read the language.”
“You probably don’t have the right pins, either,” Mom said. “They use different pronouns, a dozen of them—I don’t know whether ‘he’ and ‘she’ even enter into it these days. They change, you know.”
“Sam changes, sometimes daily,” said Dad mildly. One of the newer Bet members, who I didn’t know well. “Plenty of people do.”
Mom rolled her eyes. “Plenty of people don’t set up a system where everyone has to change gender presentation constantly just so they can sell them five wardrobes. It’s the same thing they used to do with diet pills—sell dirt to fill the hole you’ve made.”
“I’m pretty sure they enjoy it,” Dad said. “And they need to do something with their time—gender play’s better than coming up with new high-carbon products. The ones who feel strongly about minimalist fashion can always emigrate to the watersheds.”
All this was anthropologically fascinating, and would probably shock the Ringers in ways they’d benefit from being shocked. It also didn’t address my real problems with Asterion. “I guess their genders are their business, as long as they don’t mind getting ‘they’ by default. What I really need to know is how to hold them behind the fencelines where you put them. Where are they still vulnerable?” I hated asking. Our biggest enemies these days were heat waves and hurricanes; I didn’t like the thought of hurting people. Even the people who’d raised the heat waves. “They’re almost certainly behind the malware, and it’s giving them room to build more influence than they have in decades. If they ally with the Ringers, maybe more influence than they’ve ever had. We need to push them back.”
“Hold that thought,” said Mom. She left, walking quickly, and Eema shrugged.
“Make sure you download the full set of corporate constraints from the last round of talks,” said Dad. “In their own ground, you may be able to spot things we can’t pick up from the fenceline or with the occasional site inspection. Maybe drop a few extra sensors while you’re at it, especially around the proposed antenna site. If we find problems there, we can make them withdraw the offer, or at least spend more time making it right.”
We talked through Asterion’s likely environmental violations for a few minutes, with digressions into hair-raising stories about cleaning up the Anacostia. Then Mom came back.
“Here. Look at this, but don’t fidget.”
This was a pocketbot, and it did in fact look like something to fidget with. It was a miniature of the puzzlebots that grace festivals, the sort that you use to pass time on a boring monitor duty. Turquoise and indigo segments folded into geometric solids, surfaces inlaid with nail-thin slots and shallow depressions and raised patterns of bumps.
“Your Aunt Priya has been in the countermeasures corner of the anti-malware task. She worked this up on the side, as a conceptual prototype. Solve it inside the core range of a corporate network, and it should be able to insert something into their system.”
I reexamined the innocent-looking bot, feeling queasy. “Something?”
“The seed for a back door. Their security protocols aren’t as good as ours.”
“Really? Because they sure seem to have found a way around our protocols. Unless the anti-malware team knows something that should’ve made people stop glaring at Dinar by now.”
“Attack is easier than defense, always. You know that. We used to have more exploits in their systems, but they’re mostly used up. We don’t have the insights we used to—if we did, they’d never have been able to deploy this thing on us.”
Seeing the look on my face, Eema said. “Judy, you don’t need to carry this thing if you don’t feel up for it. It’s a risk—anything like this is a risk.”
“Priya’s sure the code is undetectable in this form,” said Mom. “But Eema is right. I know this isn’t your usual thing—you’re a chemist, not an activist. Which is what the world’s needed, lately.”
I stiffened. “I’m not a chemist. I practice water chemistry. Along with child-rearing and network management and sensory enhancement and also, lately, high-level negotiation with aliens. And I’m not scared. I don’t like using malware, even against corporations who’re using it against us. They won’t be better people for having their own networks break down—what the world needs is people who can think together clearly. Everywhere.” I caught my breath and tried to slow down. I wanted to sound like a respected network contributor with moral weight, not a kid mad about overcooked green beans.
“Do you think we beat these bastards by glaring at them?” asked Mom, exasperated as if I were throwing a tantrum.
Dad has an irritating way of sounding talmudic and rational, no matter what we’re talking about. He spoke mildly: “Everyone thinking clearly, cooperating together, would be best. But that’s not what we have right now. The corporations weren’t thinking cooperatively by infecting our networks. We need to stop them from doing it again, or from continuing to do it. Barring that, we at least need to redirect their resources, so we can finish fixing what they broke. If it’s a matter of the watersheds cooperating to handle a crisis versus the corporations taking control, we have to choose the watersheds.”
Talmudic and rational, and right. “We don’t even know Asterion did it. There are dozens of corporations.”
“It doesn’t matter how many names they use; they’ve always worked together as one when their power’s under threat,” Mom said. “Besides, if we can get this into one of their networks, we can spread it to others. After all, they managed it.”
I was, in fact, scared. I wasn’t stupid and I didn’t trust experts promising absolutes—“undetectable” was like a sensor reading with no error bars, and Bet members tended to dismiss any personal risk short of certain death. And for all that we held sway over the corporations in anything affecting the planet, their own laws still ruled everything else behind the fenceline. If Asterion caught me with that bot, they could subject me to whatever discipline suited them. Fines, usually, arbitrarily large, to be paid off in indentured labor. To ransom me, the network would need to accept responsibility for my actions—and the diplomatic penalties that would follow, potentially fatal to our tight-wired negotiations with corporations, nations, and Ringers.
The trade-offs were too steep to properly decide on my own, but I didn’t dare post anything to the problem boards. That would put the network’s responsibility on record, and whoever developed the corporate malware might still have thread access.
I couldn’t even talk about it with my family. Whatever my penalties might be if I got caught, those for Dinar—part of the corporate hierarchy by their laws if not by ours—would be far worse if she were held responsible. And with her corporate connections, and her conviction that we could talk them into changing their minds, I wasn’t convinced she wouldn’t try to stop me regardless of our final decision. I couldn’t tell Athëo unless I could deal with him talking to Dinar. That left Carol, who I wanted to tell very badly. But leaving her behind with the burden of knowing, and worrying about it, seemed like more unkindness than I could bear.
So I worried on my own. About the real and terrible costs if I tried to use the bot and it went badly, and about the real and desperate need to redirect the network’s attackers. And about the morality of the whole thing. On a rational level, I saw Dad’s point, and I knew clean hands never planted a garden. But my guts churned at the idea of cutting off another community’s senses the way ours had been cut.
I worried. And I tried to decide.