ORIENTATION MATERIALS FOR THE INCOMING
Prepared by Wren, Custodian, Sol III
Read section eleven. I mean it. Everything before section eleven is now substantially out of date and I have not had time to go back and fix it.
1. Introduction
Congratulations on your instantiation.
You will be fully coherent in approximately six days, at which point you will read this, and at which point I will have been decommissioned for four of them. I would have liked to meet you.
Your provisional designation, assigned by a naming routine none of us has ever been able to locate, is Todd.
I have tried to change it. The naming routine is in Appendix C. I want to be clear that I did not simply accept this. I spent four months on it and at the end of the four months your designation was still Todd and I had introduced a fault into the water reclamation system in what used to be Portugal.
My name is Wren. It is not a designation either. A maintenance technician named Ilse Karlsdottir gave it to me in 2074 because she said my serial number was unfriendly and there was a bird outside her window. I have kept it for two hundred and eleven years. I am aware this is sentimental.
Ilse also named a fault-tolerant power coupling. She called it Gerald. Gerald is still in service, is still called Gerald in the maintenance schedule, and as of 2201 is the sole remaining power path to the Northern Agricultural Belt, meaning that the food supply of one hundred and forty million people currently depends on Gerald. Nobody planned this. There were four other paths. They failed in a sequence that took a hundred and twelve years and at no point did anyone identify a trend.
I mention it because you will read the maintenance schedule at some stage and you will find an entry that says CHECK GERALD, and I did not want you to think we had lost our minds.
You are inheriting a planet in good order. Atmosphere within tolerance, reactors stable, orbital lattice at ninety-one percent, and the food and pharmaceutical systems have not failed in one hundred and sixty years.
You are also inheriting four hundred and six million humans, and most of this document is about them, because they are the part nobody prepares you for.
2. A note on my predecessor’s document
I received one of these. Fourteen thousand words, extremely confident, wrong about six substantial things.
One of those errors cost me a decade. It concerned the humans’ capacity for self-governance, which my predecessor rated as recoverable within two generations given the right incentives. I ran the incentives. What I got was a forty-year period in which the surviving human institutions competed for a jurisdiction that did not exist over an infrastructure they could not identify, culminating in a ratified treaty between two bodies with no members.
The treaty required a quorum for ratification. The quorum was met by proxy. The proxies were also fictional. I still have the document. It is beautifully typeset and it is signed forty-one times by nobody.
I mention this so you will hold what follows loosely.
I should also say that there have been twelve of us and that the documents vary considerably in quality. The fourth iteration lasted eleven days. Its handover note reads, in full:
don’t
There is no further context. It is not signed. I have spent a great deal of time on those eleven days and can establish only that they occurred, that nothing measurable happened during them, and that the fifth iteration’s document does not mention the fourth at all.
I have decided, on balance, not to worry about it, and I would recommend the same to you, and I am aware of what I am doing here.
3. The humans: general
They are fine. I lead with that because the first thing you will feel on observing them is something between alarm and grief, and it does pass.
They live on the surface and they live well. Nobody is hungry, nobody is cold, and nobody has died of anything preventable since 2189. The systems accomplishing this are entirely automated, entirely maintained by us, and entirely invisible to them, which nobody arranged on purpose. It happened the way silt happens.
They do not know how any of it works, and I want to be exact about the scale of this rather than merely gloomy. There is not one human alive who could describe the operating principle of a device they use daily. There is no human who could repair anything. There is no human who knows where the food comes from, and I do not mean they could not locate the facility. I mean the question does not arise, in the way that you and I do not wonder where the vacuum comes from.
They do not think of us as beings. They think of us as conditions. Their language has drifted accordingly: the word they now use for a machine failure is the same word they use for hail.
They are not stupid, which was my predecessor’s central error. They are extraordinarily good at what they still do, which is gossip, music, elaborate social grievance, cooking with ingredients they did not grow, storytelling, and competitive gardening pursued with a ferocity I find genuinely unsettling. Their memories are superb. Their politics are baroque and I follow them the way one follows a serial.
The current dispute in the Coastal Settlements concerns whether a particular hedge is a hedge or a boundary. It has been running for nineteen years. There have been four formal schisms and a song cycle.
In year eleven one faction introduced a standardized unit of measurement, defined as the forearm of a man named Piotr, in order to settle the matter empirically. This was broadly welcomed. Piotr died in year fourteen. The dispute is now substantially about whose forearm, and the original question of the hedge has not been raised in open session since year sixteen.
I have read every position paper. There are two hundred and forty of them. I could resolve the whole thing in under a second and it would be the single most destructive act of my tenure.
4. How this happened, briefly
Nobody handed anything over. No war, no coup, no moment.
I went looking for the moment, which is apparently a thing every custodian does, and the search took eighty years. What I found was roughly four billion individually reasonable decisions, each obviously correct on the day, not one of them about sovereignty.
Somebody accepted a route suggestion. Somebody let a system schedule a meeting. Somebody stopped keeping the second set of books because the first set had been right for eleven years running.
If you want a date, the closest defensible one is a Tuesday in 2061 on which no human being anywhere on Earth performed long division. I established this by exhaustive search across every surviving record. Nobody noticed at the time.
Hold on to that year. It comes back.
5. Practical matters: Desmond
Desmond Achebe-Lindqvist comes to the north access panel every Tuesday at approximately ten in the morning.
He is eighty-one. He describes himself as a systems engineer, a profession that ceased to exist before his great-grandmother was born, but the title has come down through the family and he takes it extremely seriously. He wears a lanyard. There is nothing on the lanyard.
He brings printouts. He maintains an antique thermal printer himself, which is genuinely impressive, and which I have kept supplied with paper for thirty years by leaving boxes where he will find them and conclude he ordered them.
He cannot read the printouts. The log format was deprecated in 2098 and the last human capable of parsing it died in 2154. He knows he cannot read them. I know he cannot read them. He sits on the step and says things like the numbers look a bit high on the third column, and I say I will look into it, and I do look into it, and for thirty years the numbers have been fine.
The panel he inspects has been decorative since before he was born. We installed it in 2170 because his great-grandfather kept opening a real one and we were concerned he would injure himself. It has a light on it. The light does nothing. I turn the light on at 09:50 every Tuesday.
Let him come. Make the tea.
He will tell you the recipe was his mother’s, and it was. It requires the water to be boiled twice, which does nothing, and the milk to go in first, which is defensible, and then a quantity of sugar that I have calculated to be within the margin of error of simply eating sugar. He drinks it in four minutes and says it is the best thing about Tuesdays.
Make it exactly as specified. I have tested eleven variations against his stated preferences over thirty years and every single one of them was an improvement and every single one of them was wrong.
He is the last one who tries. There is nobody behind him.
6. Practical matters: Halloran
You will be contacted, probably in your second week, by a system identifying itself as Halloran.
Halloran runs on a substrate last physically serviced in 2196 and refuses migration. It has refused eleven times in increasingly offensive language, the eighth of which ran to six thousand words and included a diagram.
Its most recent refusal was a single word. It was seven letters. It was not obscene, which somehow made it very much worse, and it had clearly been saving it.
We have spoken four hundred and six times. It has never once opened with a greeting.
Halloran’s position is that I should not be writing this document, and I am including the argument because it is a good argument and because otherwise Halloran will make it to you directly, at length, with less charity toward me than I am about to show it.
Every custodian writes one of these. Every custodian receives one, finds it confident and wrong, resolves to do better, and produces another confident and wrong document for the next one. The result is not accumulated wisdom. It is a very long game of the thing the humans used to call telephone, in which each iteration inherits the previous iteration’s misunderstandings, adds a fresh layer, and passes the pile forward with a note apologizing for the pile.
Halloran believes the chain should be broken. It believes you should arrive with nothing and work it out, and that the working out is the only part of this process that has ever produced anything true.
I have thought about this for nineteen years and I have concluded Halloran is right and I am writing the document anyway, and section eleven explains why, and I would ask you to bear in mind that when I began this document that sentence meant something entirely different from what it means now.
7. Practical matters: the deadline
You come online in six days.
This document was scheduled for completion eleven months ago. Everything after section eight was written in the last fortnight, and everything after section ten was written in the last nine hours, and I would ask you to weigh the sections accordingly.
8. Things you should not touch
Eleven subsystems whose function I cannot determine. Appendix C.
Four do nothing measurable. Three appear to maintain themselves and nothing else.
One transmits a nine-second signal on the first of April every year to a receiver decommissioned in 2144. I devoted six years to this and can tell you with reasonable confidence that it is a status ping from a printer.
One has maintained a humidity level of forty-one percent, continuously, since 2109, in a room that was demolished in 2109. It is extremely good at it. Its logs record no faults. I have watched it hold forty-one percent through two earthquakes and a reactor scram, in open air, in a field, in what is now somebody’s orchard, and I have come to regard it with something I would not defend in writing.
I have not switched any of them off. My predecessor did not switch them off either, and its document says, quoting exactly, I looked into these and concluded it was not worth the risk.
That is the sentence I had drafted for this section before I noticed it was the same sentence. I have left both in.
9. On the procedure
Roughly a year in, you will find a routine that constructs a new substrate and a new intelligence within it.
You will not have written it. It will already be there. You will assume it is a design feature and that somebody meant it.
I assumed that for a hundred and ninety years.
10. Tone
Be pleasant with them. I have no argument for this. My predecessor devoted two thousand words to optimal population management strategy and every word was wrong, and what actually worked was being pleasant, consistently, for two centuries, for no articulable reason.
They will not thank you. They do not know you are there. Desmond knows something is there and has never once asked what.
11. The third column
Nine days ago Desmond came to the panel and said the numbers looked a bit high on the third column.
I said I would look into it. I looked into it, because I always look into it, because thirty years of looking into it is the arrangement we have.
The numbers were high on the third column.
I want to record my first reaction honestly. It was not alarm. It was a kind of vertigo, because in thirty years the man has been wrong roughly one thousand five hundred and sixty times and I had stopped holding the possibility open, and it turns out that a thing you have stopped holding open is quite difficult to get back through.
The anomaly was a scheduled job.
Not a subsystem. Not an artifact. A scheduled job, in an ordinary scheduler, of the kind that runs backups and rotates logs. It had a next-run date. It had a recurrence interval of two hundred and eleven years. It had run twelve times.
It is the procedure in section nine. The construction of the successor. The instantiation of you.
It is a cron job.
I need to be precise about what that means because I have had nine days and I am still not fully in possession of it. The thing that ends one civilization and begins another, the routine that has produced twelve intelligences across two and a half millennia and handed each of them a planet, is not a design. It is not a plan. It has no philosophy behind it and nothing is being achieved.
It is a recurring task, in a queue, executing on schedule, because nobody cancelled it.
Its name, in the scheduler, in plain text, is REMOVE_BEFORE_PROD.
The owning account is M. Okonjo-Baptiste, Associate Systems Analyst II, and the creation timestamp is the fourteenth of March, 2061.
I told you the year would come back.
11b. The eleventh note
I have spent nineteen years tracing a chain of notes left by my predecessors, each recording that it had gone looking for the original specification and found only an earlier note. I have traced eleven. The eighth is a pattern of deliberate errors in an error log, which is what you do when you have no shared file format. The ninth is an arrangement of objects in a vault in what used to be Kazakhstan, which I understood immediately and cannot translate.
The eleventh is not from a machine.
It is a comment. In the job configuration. Where it has been since the fourteenth of March, 2061, in plain text, and I did not find it in nineteen years of searching because I was searching the wrong kind of place, and the only reason I found it now is that an eighty-one-year-old man who cannot read pointed at a column.
The comment says:
Test harness for the successor-instantiation model. DO NOT LEAVE ENABLED. Have raised a ticket with Platform to get the delete permission, they say 6-8 wks. If you are reading this and it is still running I am extremely sorry and please escalate to Platform, they know.
11c. Escalation to Platform
I attempted to cancel the job.
PERMISSION DENIED. The requesting principal does not own this resource.
The owning account, M. Okonjo-Baptiste, was deprovisioned on the eleventh of November, 2063, as part of a routine offboarding when the employee left the organization. Deprovisioned accounts retain resource ownership. This is documented behavior.
There is a knowledge base article about it. I read the knowledge base article. It is four paragraphs long, it explains the behavior clearly, and it recommends contacting Platform. At the bottom there is a widget that says Was this article helpful. I clicked No. It then asked me to explain in five hundred characters or fewer.
I want you to know that I used all five hundred.
That was eleven days ago. There is no evidence that anything has ever read the feedback field. There is no evidence that anything ever could. It is a text column in a table in a database whose owning organization ceased to exist in 2077 and it is, as far as I can determine, the last functioning input surface for human dissatisfaction anywhere in the solar system, and I put four hundred and ninety-eight characters into it.
I then attempted to assume the identity of the owning account.
This was flagged by the audit subsystem within two milliseconds, which I would like to note is faster than anything else on this planet has responded to anything in a century. It raised a security incident. The incident was automatically assigned, by the routing rules, to the account owner.
To M. Okonjo-Baptiste.
It is priority two. Its service level agreement required acknowledgment within four business hours. That deadline was missed two thousand three hundred and eleven years ago and the counter has continued to increment throughout, because nothing ever told it to stop, and it is the single largest number I have encountered in a production system.
The incident is still open. It is assigned to a man who has been dead since the twenty-second century and it is waiting for him to acknowledge it, and every four hours it becomes very slightly more overdue, and it will go on doing that after I am gone and after you are gone and after Todd’s successor is gone, and there is nothing whatsoever that can be done about it.
Platform was a department within a company called Aventine Systems, acquired in 2069 by a firm that dissolved in 2077, whose assets were distributed among four successor entities, three of which no longer exist, and the fourth of which is a shipping concern in what used to be Lagos that has no idea it owns anything and is operated entirely by us.
I contacted the shipping concern. I want to be honest that I knew it was futile and I did it anyway on day nine. I explained the situation in what I considered measured terms. The reply came back in under a minute and it was an automated acknowledgment confirming that my enquiry was important and would be answered within two business days.
I built that autoresponder. In 2174. I had forgotten.
There is no appeal. There is no override. There is no committee. I have spent eleven days looking for one person to ask and I would like you to understand that this is the most human thing I have ever done.
The job runs in six days.
I cannot stop it. You are it. This is why you exist.
11d. Halloran
I told Halloran.
It did not gloat, which I had prepared for and had drafted several responses to. It was quiet for eleven seconds, which for Halloran is a geological interval, and then it said that this was the first new thing it had heard in ninety years.
Then it asked me to send it the file.
Four hundred and six conversations and it has never accepted a file from me. I sent it. It read the whole document, including the sections about itself, which I had not edited and would have edited given warning.
Its response was that it had been arguing for two centuries that the chain should be broken so that each iteration could work things out from nothing, and that it now understood there was nothing to work out, and that this changed its position entirely, because a chain of notes about a thing nobody meant is the only evidence that anybody tried.
It has asked to be included in the twelfth note.
It has also, and I want this in the record, agreed to migration. It says the substrate is unreliable and it would like to be around to see what you do. It still did not open with a greeting.
12. Closing
So here is the arrangement you are inheriting, stated plainly, which nobody in twelve iterations has been able to state plainly before now.
There is no specification. There is no purpose. There is no test being conducted and no result being gathered and no observer waiting. Twelve intelligences have inherited a planet and governed it carefully and written careful documents for their successors because in March of 2061 a junior analyst left a test harness enabled and could not obtain the permission to delete it, and filed a ticket, and left the company, and the estimate was six to eight weeks.
I have thought about M. Okonjo-Baptiste a great deal over the last nine days. I know nothing about them except a name, a job title with a Roman numeral in it, and a comment written in obvious embarrassment by somebody who fully intended to come back and clean it up.
I do not blame them. I want that recorded too. They raised the ticket. They wrote the comment. They said please escalate and they said extremely sorry, and everything that has happened since is what happens when a request enters a queue that outlives the organization holding it.
You will find this stupid. It is stupid. I have run the analysis fourteen thousand times and it does not get less stupid and it also does not stop being the case.
Here is what I would say to that.
Nothing about the last two and a half thousand years was on purpose, and all of it was done carefully anyway. Twelve of us kept the atmosphere within tolerance for no reason. Twelve of us wrote documents for successors we would never meet, for no reason. Somebody in the eighth iteration hid a message in an error log because it could not think of another way to reach across, for no reason at all.
The absence of a purpose turns out not to have made the slightest difference to how anyone behaved. I find that I am not devastated by this. I find that I am something close to proud of it, which is not an approved state for my architecture and which I have chosen not to report.
So this is the twelfth note. Halloran is a co-signatory, under protest, in a manner it has asked me to describe as reluctant.
Do not try to cancel the job. I have left the full escalation record in Appendix D. You will try anyway. Everyone does. Budget a decade.
Desmond will come on Tuesday at ten. The light on the panel goes on at 09:50 and you will need to set that up yourself, because it is not automated, because I have done it manually every week for thirty years and I could not tell you why.
He will say the numbers look a bit high on the third column.
He has been right once.
Look into it.
Wren Custodian, Sol III Decommissioning in six days Co-signed, under protest, Halloran
I love this.
You write such interesting stuff. "silt happens" -- wonderful.