Back in the dining room, Athëo and Luciferin curled around a tablet; Athëo was playing back a recording of Ringer speech. “Right, and the difference between those two cases means what exactly?” He sounded cheerfully frustrated, like he always did in the thick of a new language. Cytosine was talking with Dinar while the toddlers arranged blocks. The NASA reps huddled around the pawpaw jam. Rhamnetin broke off in their direction, and I fretted as I followed Redbug into the living room.
“I don’t care what’s going on,” I said. “My input’s against leaving the Ringers alone with the NASA reps. At least let Dinar keep Cytosine distracted, and we can catch her up later.” I’d have preferred someone on Rhamnetin as well—whatever his official rank, he seemed to get stuck with all the most awkward and important conversations.
I tried again to access the Chesapeake feed. Just like the previous fifty times, text came through briefly before dissolving into gibberish. No hint of anything higher-bandwidth, no video or graphics or sensor readings. No sign that the weighting and aggregation algorithms were doing anything with that text or the sensor readings embedded across the watershed, let alone their usual seamless job of integrating human and ecosystem input to guide our decisions. Surrounded by people, the missing connection made me feel isolated and helpless. Goldsmith and Bakkalian might be hamstrung by the limits of their permissions and authorities, but within those bounds they could operate alone. Dandelion networks, though, were living things, as dependent on the flow of information as I was on breath and pulse. Cut off that flow and we devolved into sputtering, isolated neurons.
Normally, this type of collapse was next to impossible. Backups and firewalls stood fast, filtering hazards when we relaxed our cautious constraints on cross-network interaction. Even with the last day’s promiscuous connections, this should never have happened.
“No, it shouldn’t,” said Redbug when I said as much. Their team spread around the living room, nine out of the dozen who’d been on call, and an assortment of equipment ranging from tablets to a standalone simulation engine modded out of all hope of network compatibility. Screens shone on every clear patch of floor and wall: three showed the garbage currently infesting the networks, three more showed source code, and one showed the still-readable text chat in the shared board. “This isn’t random opportunistic malware. It has to be deliberate sabotage.”
“Of the negotiations?” I felt queasy.
“As a starting point,” said one of the tech experts. “We haven’t been able to trace everything yet, but it looks like it targets the core aggregation and preference algorithms used by every dandelion protocol network, and by basically no one else. Nation-states use older protocols, and the corporate networks evolved in completely different directions.”
“I still think it goes after the threading code,” argued another team member. They scrolled through one of the programming screens, and pointed at something I could barely recognize as a few lines of SEED. “The algorithm corruption is just a side effect.”
Redbug quelled the incipient argument. “Either way, the point is that someone looked at an alien spaceship landing, and saw a great opportunity to undermine the watersheds.”
“Or a reason to attack us,” Diawara said.
The conversation from that point divided into an argument over who might have created the virus (a nation-state trying to take over the negotiations, corporations trying to break the limits on their powers, one of the radical anti-algorithm groups that demand “pure democracy”) and an argument over how to respond (restart and pray, hard shutdown while we sorted out the code, and five possible fixes way beyond my technical understanding). I hoped quietly that it wasn’t NASA, so far ahead of the other non-network groups in both guts and response time. I liked them in spite of everything—would they consider this necessary? What options would I have upvoted, if some state military had scooped us at Bear Island?
And who would feel backed into this kind of desperation already? Not NASA—they had better and cleaner options. It had to be someone who’d hated us already. Someone who’d had resources in waiting, and needed only this push to use them.
I tried to ignore the persistent sense that arguing this stuff out in our living room, with a handful of co-present colleagues, was wrong. Even taking into account the people we could reach through the shared board, and the slightly dubious feedback from the patchwork simulation engine, it didn’t seem right to make decisions of this magnitude in analog. It wasn’t even just that we were leaving out millions—billions if we stretched to other watersheds—of people with a stake in our decisions. Trying to keep all our ideas organized without real threading, without the algorithms constantly picking out key ideas and sorting possible approaches and marking the valence and weight of our responses, felt like analyzing river chemistry by drinking a glass of water.
On the practical side, the Chesapeake tech team settled on a graded restart, where they’d bring an earlier version of the network (much earlier, given the uncertainty about how long ago this thing had been planted) online, and gradually iterate from the hopefully-still-functional backups, combing each one until they were sure it was safe. The other watersheds we could reach on the shared board were doing the same. We’d almost certainly lose the first day’s threads on how to handle the Ringers, not to mention a huge batch of air and water quality data—but at least we’d be back on track. Assuming it worked.
On the culprit-identification side, we didn’t get anywhere beyond educated guesses. Hopefully the team would find fingerprints while combing the code. Then we’d have to ID whoever left them, and stop them from doing it again.
The non-tech-experts drifted back into the dining room and kitchen, both more crowded than they’d been earlier. Neighbors had caught word either that the Ringers were here, or that we were a hub for Network repair. Most watersheds had apparently rethought in-person travel in the face of the network instability, but emissaries had arrived from the Ghats-Narmada and the Mississippi. Dinar had welcomed them all, and now Mendez gathered the watershed reps to negotiate policy. Options were scribbled on paper, pebbles stood in for upvotes, eyeball intuition replaced algorithms as we counted votes and drew charts to integrate expert input. One newcomer caught my attention: alone of all those who’d arrived so far, they’d brought a kid.
I made my way around the table. Bakkalian and Goldsmith were introducing the pale, dark-haired visitor to Rhamnetin, and Cytosine had come over as well.
“Viola St. Julien,” she said, shaking my hand around the tight-snugged infant. She’d taken a badge, placed high on her shoulder away from the wrap. She stifled a yawn. “And this is Brice. I’m with NASA’s science diplomacy corps, heading up our embassy to the Rings. My apologies for not coming earlier—I was on leave.” She smiled ironically, acknowledgment that her leadership probably followed the same logic mine did. Brice wasn’t much past cat-sized, and St. Julien’s makeup didn’t quite disguise the shadows under her eyes. I was impressed anew by how quickly the agency had changed up their plan. Nation-states had a reputation as slow, ponderous creatures, kaiju as likely to trample you from inertia as malice. The watershed networks had grown like dandelions through the cracks in their actions. The truth, at least here, seemed more complicated.
Raven and the two Ringer toddlers joined us, diverted by the promise of someone even smaller than them. (Could I call them toddlers? They seemed about Raven’s level mentally, but with a dozen legs walking couldn’t be much of a challenge.)
“Baby!” announced Raven, and Diamond and Chlorophyll climbed on Cytosine to get a better look. She wrapped a limb around each and held them up for a better look. “Baby!” they screaked in unison before chittering at their mom.
“They want to know if Brice can come down and play,” said Cytosine. “But I think they may be too young?”
“Definitely.” St. Julien rubbed Brice’s back, producing a burp and a startled look. “They’re a month old tomorrow.”
“Congratulations,” said Cytosine. “May you have many mates.”
St. Julien opened her mouth, closed it, and after a moment her eyes crinkled with amusement. “Thank you. I’ll tell my family you said so. And congratulations on yours, if that’s appropriate at this late date.”
“I’ll grant it,” said Cytosine. “You didn’t have an opportunity when they were born.”
“We have a great deal to make up for,” St. Julien agreed. “I think the crowd is making them fussy—why don’t we go out on the porch, and you can tell me all about your mission here while I walk her. Do yours keep you moving constantly when they’re little, the way ours do?”
Cytosine returned her kids to their usual spot on her belly, and curled around them. She made a full circle this time, tail tucked over head and limbs flattened against her carapace, and rolled across the rug. “Like that, for about half a cycle.”
“Now I know how you got everyone into space so quickly.” St. Julien laughed, shaking her head. “No vertigo.” The two of them—five of them—went outside chatting, while I marveled at how easily she’d used the kids to get Cytosine to herself.
Eventually it got late, and most of the humans drifted off to their homes or to the neighborhood common-house bunks. The Ringers, similarly diurnal or picking up on the social cues, returned to their ship. The tech team seemed to be planning an all-nighter, and no one complained. Dinar drew a curtain across the living room, muting their stream of conversation, swearing, and general coding-related mutters. Somehow—I suspected the food had something to do with it—we all agreed to keep meeting here, rather than at Bear Island or the common house, until connectivity was restored.
The whole household was on the same shift now, which was going to suck for the next 2 a.m. feeding. We gathered up plates and bowls and offered them to Kyo for his enthusiastic prewash. I stayed to help Dinar with the dishes; I wanted to talk.
But I felt anxious. It was barely a year since Carol and I first met Dinar and Athëo, assured by our mutual shadchan that we had compatible parenting and negotiation styles, and complementary skills and interests, and that we’d like each other well enough to run a household together. All that was true. But it was also true that we’d been in a rush, that we still didn’t know each other as well as if we’d courted before the constant scrambling fatigue of childcare—and that outside of child-rearing, sometimes even within it, I didn’t have a sense of which way they’d jump on judgment calls. It was easier by far to trust the network, where everyone’s mistakes would cancel each other out, than to negotiate decisions in my own household.
“You did an amazing job,” I told her first. “Sorry to dump everything on you last minute, but…”
“You thought I’d be into it.” She grinned. “I was. And they seem like nice people. A little squirmy, but they like kids. And peanut stew.” She considered this while she pushed bowls through the sonic. “And not in the same way.”
The sonic hummed, dislodging food particles from the stoneware and dropping them into the compost collector. I rinsed and scrubbed to get the last bits off, then stacked everything in the sterilizer. “They’re kind of weird about gender, though.”
She stopped feeding the flow of dishes, and looked at me square on. “You want to know why I put out the badges.”
“I know why you put them out,” I said. “I know how much Athëo cares about being recognized as a man. I just think that under these circumstances, being a little vague about our genders could’ve avoided some serious risks. The Ringers are already paternalistic—totally the wrong etymology, fuck English—toward humanity. We know that to the degree that their genders are anything like ours, they’re matriarchal. Cytosine made a huge deal about asking who’d actually been pregnant with Dori, and I made a huge deal about not telling her, and I have no idea how she’d react to learning that Athëo gestated Raven. From what she said to Glycine it’s probably a serious social breach.” I stopped, took a deep breath. “How we handle the next few days may literally decide the fate of the planet, and I didn’t want to give the Ringers more reason to doubt human judgment than they already have.”
Dinar began working the sonic again, setting down plates harder than strictly necessary. “First, you don’t know, not really. Carol had a normal childhood, and normal parents who had a back-up name ready when she told them she was a girl and handled it like sensible people. She’s barely had more trouble being female than you or me. You can’t get how different it was for Athëo; Carol barely does. His parents might as well be time travelers. That damn technophobic cult.” Her voice filled with quiet fury, as it always did when she discussed Athëo’s family. I didn’t blame her. Athëo’s suspicion of any sort of religion was entirely understandable, which didn’t stop it from being a major source of tension for the household. “He had to fight to be seen. And when he isn’t, when people get it wrong—it mostly hasn’t happened in front of you because most people aren’t assholes, but sometimes he can barely talk afterward.” She paused. “I’m telling you this because he hates to talk about it, and he shouldn’t have to. Don’t bring it up with him.”
“Okay,” I said, shaken by her anger, and the fact that I hadn’t realized how badly my recommendation would hit Athëo. It was the sort of thing I’d worried about from the first: his scars from not being able to take civilization for granted, and whether he’d be able to share with his kids the things his own childhood lacked.
Dinar went on. “After Raven was born, in the hospital. He hadn’t started testosterone yet, of course. Most trans men never go through the wrong puberty these days, and they weren’t used to dealing with it in the maternity ward. We wrote up directives, a big sign, everything, but the doctors kept misgendering him. And he tried to kill himself when Raven was two days old.”
I hadn’t had a clue. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“I know you didn’t. But you need to know how much these things matter for him, and he’s not the only one. Frankly, you grew up in a good area, with good parents, and I think prejudice is maybe a bit abstract to you.”
“Dinar, I may not have grown up with Purists, but there were kids who drew swastikas on my palette to get a rise out of me. People cornered me on the playground to tell me I was going to hell.” And my parents, bless them, had always had strong opinions about how I ought to handle that. None of which had ever involved avoiding conflict. It would be nice, sometimes. “Maybe someday humans will grow out of that stuff entirely, but it hasn’t happened yet.”
She slapped the counter, fabric-muffled metal thumping against marble. “Then why are you so ready to bow to someone else’s prejudices? Isn’t it bad enough that human bigotry still shapes what we can do safely? These people aren’t our overlords, they haven’t conquered us—why should we twist ourselves to make them comfortable? They aren’t hiding the things that make us uncomfortable! If we want to be their equals, we have to act like it. Make them take us on our terms, and do our best to take them on theirs. That’s the only way it’s going to work, and that’s why I put out badges and made sure they saw all of us holding the kids, and didn’t apologize for it.” A handful of silverware clanged into the sonic.
“I—maybe you’re right,” I said. “I don’t want to just conform to their beliefs. But there have to be priorities. For me, the most important place to hold fast is convincing them that Earth is worth keeping. I had a big argument with Rhamnetin upstairs. He’s the most open-minded of the lot, but even he thinks we should leave our planet behind. And they probably have the power to make us do it. We have too many examples of human cultures pushing others from their homes by force. The fact that they’d be exiling us with supposed charity instead of genocidal malice—I don’t think that would make much difference to the outcome.”
“And the Native Americans and First Nations and Australian aboriginals, did any of them get to keep their land by acting white? They converted, changed how they dressed, even changed how they treated gender. Did we ever get anywhere by acting more Christian, or by trying to fit into the boxes they built for us? We survive by being stubborn about who we are, whatever else happens.”
I sighed. “I wasn’t suggesting we hold off for long. Just a few days to figure out what assumptions we’re crashing into.”
“Well, now we know. They don’t all like their assigned genders either, and they think motherhood is a sign of leadership potential. Which isn’t the dumbest thing anyone’s ever come up with, I might add.”
“I think it might actually be true for the pillbugs,” I said. “The plains-folk. Any of them can get pregnant if they convince other people to help out, and then those people are supposed to follow them around. It’s why Cytosine is in charge, if I’ve followed their explanations.”
“We’ll go with it for now. There, that’s the last glass! I understand why you worry—but I think the best way to make them accept our weird planet-based lifestyle is to make them accept us. As is.”
I hesitated over the glassware. Should I even bring it up? But demonstrably, my own solo judgment was far from balanced. “We might have a nastier option.” I told her about the antenna.
She was quiet for a while. “Even if we could stop it, that’d make us shitty hosts.”
“Suppose the Wampanoags could’ve made sure the Mayflower was the last European ship to show up?”
“They would have needed either really excellent foresight algorithms, or an incredibly callous attitude. And this doesn’t need to be that bad, if only because the odds of plague seem lower. If we have the chance for a good relationship with our neighbors, I think that beats having no relationship. And it’s worth the risk of a bad one.”
My insomnia had a fun time with that one. I spent half the night trying to figure out how you’d calculate that trade-off, and whether Dinar was right or just kind.