Tiffany (di Asterion, or di Chesapeake, or di Nada, if anyone here cared) grimaced at the projection on the table.
Brend, still doodling in eir notebook, asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. In shocking news, it’s harder to fix things than it is to break them. Especially if you’ve lost your documentation. I need to go out and stare at trees.”
“How does that help? Does that help?”
Tiffany stretched and glared around their network-provided quarters—the whole top floor of a house twice as old as Zealand, in a neighborhood full of network techies (sorry, tech experts, don’t you know you’re more than your work) who knew exactly what tha’d done and were not only eager to discuss the details but critique them. “Around here, you can’t troubleshoot code without going outside and seeing how it’s fucked up the data layers on every goddamn bush.”
Brend flinched. “You hate it here.”
Tiffany cursed thonself, silently for once, and went to pull Brend up. “I’m sorry, it’s just the change making me grumpy. And having to undo a knot I tied myself. And the way everyone here is so…” Tha tried to put it into words. “Open. Serious. About everything.”
“Naked.”
“Yeah, that. They want us to go around naked, too.” Tiffany had never been any good at presentation—was naked thonself by most civilized standards—but was discovering how many layers of protection tha’d worn at home that were simply meaningless here.
Outside, the early evening air finally held a bite of autumn. Summer had been worse, not because it got any hotter than Zealand, but because you couldn’t just stay under the surface or hang out on spray balconies, and also because every time someone complained in Fahrenheit it sounded like they’d moved to the surface of the sun. Tiffany tried to appreciate the breeze and the scent of dying leaves, reminders that the Chesapeake was heading for the best part of the year while Zealand was tilting toward the worst.
Brend, at least, was enjoying emself. E ignored the trees, and the fastidious details of their augmented tagging, in favor of the people. There were plenty of them out, this time of year and this time of day, and of all three species. People walking dogs and the weird skittery ferret things that Ringers were fond of, shouting questions at neighbors, chasing balls and drones. If Tiffany could only relax, Brend would happily dive into writing subversive reports about how the networks covertly signaled status using material origin tags, and differently subversive reports about how Ringers might build on their existing gender markers to expand their presentation options.
Brend put a hesitant hand on Tiffany’s wrist. “You’re ruminating again. And not looking at the trees.”
Tha shook thonself. “Sorry. I’ll try to stop looping. Okay, let’s try this…” Tha pulled up the repair thread, where the wounded network was finally proving itself up to the task of tracking its own modification, and dropped a message: I’ve pushed another round of fixes to the carbon uptake tag function. As a reminder, in the error condition these tags were underweighted and did not properly link to all relevant threads. I’m putting in a test reading of a blight affecting the—checking tags that none of the actual locals would’ve needed—elms on Longfellow Street between 38th and 41st; this reading is incorrect and should retract along with all propagated impacts in 24 hours (which is also a test of the retraction function).
Tiffany watched the imaginary blight spread down the block, watched the thread report back on all the little ways it affected the Chesapeake’s carbon balance, watched the algorithm spawn automatic responses and hook up with a weird Ringer feedback model that wasn’t even part of the original propagation chain, let out a triumphant “Ha!” as the pings to human-in-the-loop checkers worked this time. Which was the part tha hadn’t fully understood, back in Morlock Central, and therefore hadn’t been able to figure out how tha’d broken it for weeks running.
Sure enough, one of the neighborhood’s on-call sensor nerds poked their head out from an old apartment building, spotted Tiffany and Brend, and called: “I’m guessing the trees don’t actually have chicken pox, yeah?”
“Should’ve inoculated them while you had the chance,” said Tiffany deadpan.
The in-the-loop human came out anyway, flipping on wristband sensors as they approached the supposedly ill elm. “Best check to be safe. Anyone want an ecological management demo?” That last was loud enough to attract a couple of tree-folk who did, in fact, want a demo. Tiffany stepped back to give them room, and watched as they ran cheerfully through their protocols. After they were done, they turned back to thon. “Thank you, by the way.”
“Why?” asked Tiffany, annoyed. “I broke it.” Tha tried to remind people of that as much as possible; if you were the boogeyman you might as well get some mileage out of it.
“And now you’re working to fix it. Isn’t that what we’re all doing, as a species?” The sensor nerd waved, and left before Tiffany could comment on the dubious wisdom of this philosophical statement.
“You were a curmudgeon at home, too, you know,” said Brend. “You don’t need to feel weirder about it here. I know who you are, and I know how you act. It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” said Tiffany. Tha hunched uncomfortably, and admitted what had been going through thos head. “I’m holding you back.”
“You’re not.” Brend reached out to grip thos hand, but kept watching the world around them. “I’m learning this place in my own way, and you’re learning it in yours. And I can tell you’re enjoying the challenge even though you’re also mad that you set it up. And if we don’t like what we learn here—once you’re done with your cleanup, we’ve got a whole universe to go be ourselves in.”
Tiffany gripped back. “We do, don’t we? I’ve got a few more weeks of work to go, but then—yeah, let’s give the rest of the galaxy a try.”
There were Ringers everywhere you turned on Earth these days, but it had still taken Viola St. Julien months to get the right people in the room. Months of feeling people out, not simply to secure agreement on immediate action, but to find kindred souls who sensed the logic behind those actions. Beyond this room, this meeting, they could play out the art of the possible, could build towers from the sordid little compromises that were the life and limitation of nation-states. But the heart of the work needed passion and ideals powerful enough to carry their goal over all those barriers. Otherwise the long game would play out like one of those cartoons where someone offers up a glorious idea, all golden gears and shining wheels, and passes it through grant applications and committees until it turns into a kid’s broken-down wagon.
So this would be a test—hopefully the first of many—of Viola’s vision for adapting network-style value algorithms to something new. Of using them to excavate the beliefs that had lifted people into space in the first place, and polish and strengthen those beliefs until they could bring humanity to the stars. The people in the room today would create the seed for that algorithm.
That seed, so far, started with Viola, still backed by NASA along with the State Department and a faction of NOAA, and given interstellar authority by Brice’s babbling presence. She’d found sympathetic ears in the vestiges of JAXA and ISRO, in a frustrated circle of spaceflight enthusiasts from the Niger Delta network, and in a small group that ostensibly still represented the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
And, finally, she’d found the representatives from Perihelion 50. The Peris were obsessive about a future in space by Ringer standards; their questioners were the sort of people you had to drag away from their desks to eat reluctant lunches. They’d actually managed to invent food pills. They’d be called transhumanists if they were human, and their lifespans averaged out at normal for their species via a combination of bio experiments that turned out spectacularly well and those that ended spectacularly badly. They were thoroughly alien and utterly familiar, delightfully argumentative guests at interspecies movie marathons as long as you didn’t let them bring the snacks.
Adenine, one of their plains-folk questioners, had hitched a ride to Earth despite not being part of a breeding family. Out of all the people here, Viola was most certain of them. They had no attachment to the way things were done now, nothing to hold them back from building something different.
She wouldn’t, until today, have listed any of the others as the least trustworthy of the group. That was before—after months of planning to get exactly the right people in the room where everything was going to start—the State rep had arrived early and brought a guest.
“Sunil—” She was not going to ask what the hell, that was not going to put this meeting on better footing.
“I know, I know.” Sunil Anagnos held up his hands. “But you really do want to talk with Ezrin. Sui has things we need, if we’re serious about starting the first human colony in the Rings.”
Viola eyed the corporate rep in sur silver-and-black dress and rocket-ship earrings, and thought about how much she regretted her last decision to play nice with company types. “We’re going to need people from everywhere, long-term. But we haven’t discussed this.”
Ignoring the obvious lack of welcome, Ezrin offered a curtsey, which was weird but had the advantage that, unlike a handshake, it didn’t take two. “Ezrin di Lunestra. And before you say anything, we stayed out of Asterion’s conglomerate after the auction. Didn’t trust them to handle this right. No one else is affiliated with us now, either—I’m only here for Lunestra Enterprises.”
“And that should matter to us because…?”
“Because we’ll offer you what we offered at the auction in the first place. Experience and honest dealing, and the promise that we want this for the same reason our ancestral companies did.”
Viola frowned and shifted Brice from one hip to the other. “Your ancestral companies.”
“Asteroid mining. Private launch vehicles. Lunar hotels. We barely got started before the networks cut off our power and the nations cut off our funding, but for us, the money was a way to follow our dreams, not the other way around. That hasn’t changed. We’ve played games with the rest of the aislands, but we never stopped our research or our storytelling, and we never stopped dreaming either. We’d like to be part of what you’re building here, and to combine the work we’ve managed to scrape together in the last fifty years with what the nation-state space agencies have done on your own.”
Viola considered. They were leaning heavily on Ringer tech for this plan, out of necessity—but that did nothing for the psychological and biological challenges of making a human city work on a Ringer habitat. If Lunestra had relevant results, it might make a difference. On the other hand, if Lunestra had cunning plans, they could scuttle everything.
While she was considering, the door to the conference room swung open and Adenine scurried in. The Ringer, familiar enough with corporate fashion from—well, mostly from interplanetary movie nights—rolled back in alarm. “Viola,” they sang out, “what the hell?”
Ezrin looked at Viola’s friend, taking in the carapace embossed with circuitry, the points of color around their sensory bumps and along their limbs that represented even more sophisticated implants, the way their eyestalks swiveled to examine sur in return. Sui raised sur hand, split fingers two and two with the thumb jutting out on its own, and offered a hopeful, “Live long and prosper?”
And Viola thought about what it would be like to build a city with people who—whatever other differences might separate them—had been telling stories about the stars for generations, holding tight to isolated hopes as societies fought and argued, waxed and waned around them. With people who’d each preserved a sliver of those early dreams, and could bring them together to resurrect the whole.
“All right,” she said. Warnings and protections could come later, another barrier to be overcome by their shared vision. She knew what she valued. “Let’s give it a try.”
Algorithms and crowdsourced threading were all very well for mass-scale problem-solving and management. For organizing a household, though—even a big one—everything still came down to a weekly meeting. Over the summer we’d held it half the time on the Solar Flare, sprawled on the moss or perched in branches; this week we were back at what I still thought of as home, around the now-expanded dining room table.
“Canning’s basically done, storing still in progress,” said Dinar, and the task list, projected on the half-cleared table and slightly distorted by a stack of ball jars and a couple slices of hazelnut cake, updated itself accordingly. The house still smelled of peach and fig from the last round of preserving, scents that would linger until overwhelmed by baking apples and chestnuts. She frowned and continued: “Add ‘Divide storage between basement and Solar Flare’ to task sequence.”
“Some of that should go in with the trade samples,” suggested Xenon, and the list updated again. Homemade jams weren’t going to be a major trade item, obviously, but given the relative populations of the two solar systems, not much from Earth was going beyond the sample stage for a while.
“Some of that needs to go in me,” said Rhamnetin, who’d been threatening to invade Earth to steal our stone fruit all month. I poked his nearest limb, winning another battle in the Great Plum War.
“Is everyone staying here all week,” I asked, “or do you need to be back on the Rings for anything?”
“I think…” said Cytosine, prodding at the calendar. We were still working on a mesh that would read plains-folk neural signals properly, but for now we were faking much of the interface with skinsong signals. “No, you and I and Astatine are supposed to go down to the Atchafalaya and evaluate the updated split.”
“Oh shit, that’s this week?” I asked. “I thought it was next week.”
“Your inbox,” said Athëo, and I banged my head gently against the calendar and put clearing my messages on his task list again. I checked it myself and, sure enough, they’d gotten some weird readings and wanted us early. I was tagged into way too many things these days, but at least my expertise ratings were recovering nicely.
After much kludged discussion, re-weighted by hand every time Tiffany thought it had been warped by thos work, the Lower Mississippi had accepted the offer of Ringer construction tech to reallocate the river’s flow between old and new beds. It was a more nuanced solution than anything we’d been capable of, a compromise between the needs of existing communities and the river’s own inevitable transmutation. Long-term, they’d shift both river and people to the new bed on a less catastrophic schedule, with Ringer nano-construction letting them adjust the flow in ways that were manageable and even reversible.
The same technology clung to the side of our house now, creating extra rooms for the crew of the Solar Flare, suited to their needs. The best part, from my perspective, was the convenient bridge between their aerie and my and Carol’s bedroom.
“If we take a shuttle on Thursday—Diamond, stop that!” Cytosine pulled the kid back from where they’d been using their own skinsong to color in random calendar squares.
Raven ran over to tug on Diamond’s eyestalk, which always looked uncomfortable but didn’t seem to bother them. “Diamond, bad bug!” And then in considerably better Ringer than I could manage without Athëo’s synthesizer: “Come play!”
I leaned back from the scheduling discussion for a moment to watch Raven and Diamond and Chlorophyll return to an inexplicable-to-adults game with blocks and three species’ worth of dolls. Dori ignored them, focused on cruising hand-to-hand between the dining room’s varied chairs and perching frames, an expression of fierce concentration on her face. She wasn’t quite ready yet to let go and become fully bipedal, but it would be any day now.
We were all learning that way. It wasn’t romance, precisely, for most of the family, but it was that absolute desire to make our next steps as good as they could possibly be, and discover what we were capable of together. A different, equally valuable sort of love.
I turned back to the questionable sensor readings. I’d been given special access to the live flow, and I tuned into that next, transforming the data from both familiar human technology and Ringer mycelial sensors into tactile readouts along my back. I’d been using skinsong as inspiration to make those readouts more detailed and intuitive, and for a moment I immersed myself in the power and life and health of the river. I swam in the pH of the water, the bacteria levels, the speed of the current, the health and species balance of fish and crabs.
“Okay,” I said at last. “I can spot what’s bothering them. I think it’s just predictable changes from the last round of storms, within the tolerances Astatine laid out. But yeah, we should go down in person and make sure the nano-construction’s not breaking anything.”
We probably would break something, at some point, and the thought still kept me awake some nights. It would be almost impossible to share as much as we were sharing, learn as much as we were learning, without a few massive screwups. But we were sharing, and we were learning. And so far, Earth was doing better for it. We were going to give this the best try we could and—I promised the kids silently, watching them share and learn and find their way beyond anything the adults had figured out—we were going to make it work.