Edits, finished majority of Idumea

marsh/content/010.tex

@@ -22,7 +22,7 @@ I nodded. ``Not denying that, just that I think Tule had\ldots well, it's not th
 
 ``Except for Cress?''
 
-``Yeah, except for Cress. He thinks of it all the time. He really loves it. I'm old enough to remember the taboo around intraclade relationships, but it's also been a few decades since that fell apart — I think close to six now — and a few years since Cress, Tule, and Dry Grass formally made it a triad, so I'm used to it by now.''
+``Yeah, except for Cress. He thinks of it all the time. He really loves it. I'm old enough to remember the taboo around intraclade relationships, but it's also been a few decades since that fell apart --- I think close to six now --- and a few years since Cress, Tule, and Dry Grass formally made it a triad, so I'm used to it by now.''
 
 ``Well, fair enough. Everything else was just boring, then?''
 
@@ -48,7 +48,7 @@ I spent the rest of the evening at home, lounging on the couch while Hanne slouc
 
 Sedge had gone to sleep for a bit, but as she woke up, she caught me up on news from when she'd been dozing. The politicians had drafted a letter explaining what had happened on a technological level to post on the largest of the perisystem feeds. Much of it was information that we'd gained from the AVEC session with the phys-side techs, explaining that nearly 1\% of the System had been wiped out and deemed unrecoverable, that there had been a mass crashing event, that the world was assumed stable and the issue had been patched.
 
-Conspicuously missing was any mention of CPV, any mention that everyone — all 2.3 trillion of us — had crashed, or that messages were being gated and censored. Sedge explained that the last had included some gentle untruths. Rather than this being a political effort, this had been phrased as ``slowly bringing Lagrange up to full capacity''. It wasn't wrong, \emph{per se,} they really were working on bringing the feeds up to full capacity; it's just that the problem was political rather than technical.
+Conspicuously missing was any mention of CPV, any mention that everyone --- all 2.3 trillion of us --- had crashed, or that messages were being gated and censored. Sedge explained that the last had included some gentle untruths. Rather than this being a political effort, this had been phrased as ``slowly bringing Lagrange up to full capacity''. It wasn't wrong, \emph{per se,} they really were working on bringing the feeds up to full capacity; it's just that the problem was political rather than technical.
 
 Dry Grass, in our own conversations, explained that there were already rumors flying about, and that these were being subtly steered by Odists, Jonases, Selena, and, to a lesser extent, what she called `the opposition party', a group of clades led by Debarre who had settled into an uneasy truce with the others some decades back. Rumors were being nudged away from ``an attack by the Artemisians'' and towards ``solar flares or a power failure''.
 
@@ -64,7 +64,7 @@ There was a shrug, felt rather than seen. \emph{``I guess not. It's just hard fo
 
 \emph{``Well, Sedge--''}
 
-\emph{``I don't mean the logistics, Reed.''} I could hear the smirk in her words. \emph{``Or not} just \emph{the logistics — Sedge has been keeping me up to date, yeah — but just keeping up with the rest of you. Cress and Tule are glued to her side, which, fair enough. Sedge has found her in with the rest of the politicians through her. You've been hanging out with her through Sedge. Rush is off gallivanting with some other Odist\ldots``}
+\emph{``I don't mean the logistics, Reed.''} I could hear the smirk in her words. \emph{``Or not} just \emph{the logistics --- Sedge has been keeping me up to date, yeah --- but just keeping up with the rest of you. Cress and Tule are glued to her side, which, fair enough. Sedge has found her in with the rest of the politicians through her. You've been hanging out with her through Sedge. Rush is off gallivanting with some other Odist\ldots``}
 
 I sighed, steeled myself. \emph{``Well, yeah, fair enough. I've also been spending time with her because I got pulled into being a bit of management for everyone else, and because I kept Tule's merge.''}
 
@@ -122,7 +122,7 @@ Dry Grass guided the two of us through the workroom, picking up more instances a
 
 ``SERG?''
 
-``System Emergency Response Group, one of the many, \emph{many} groups of systechs. He may request greater access to the lower levels of the System's functionalities.'' She smiled faintly, tapping one last person — Debarre, as it turned out — on the shoulder. ``I am having to ramp up on all of this quite quickly. I stepped away from my role as systech a long, \emph{long} time ago, with a long-lived up-tree taking over my role.''
+``System Emergency Response Group, one of the many, \emph{many} groups of systechs. He may request greater access to the lower levels of the System's functionalities.'' She smiled faintly, tapping one last person --- Debarre, as it turned out --- on the shoulder. ``I am having to ramp up on all of this quite quickly. I stepped away from my role as systech a long, \emph{long} time ago, with a long-lived up-tree taking over my role.''
 
 ``They can't merge down?''
 
@@ -140,7 +140,7 @@ I'd had little to do with sim manipulation beyond simply expanding or reducing b
 
 ``Alright,'' she said, flumping down into one of the chairs across from the AVEC stage. ``I think we are all here. While I would obviously prefer you stay, it is not a requirement. If you need to duck out, feel free to do so. We are just waiting on Günay and we can get going.''
 
-About twenty people had shown up. It didn't seem to be twenty clades — there were two Odists, after all, with Dry Grass and another from the eighth stanza, Why Ask Questions When The Answers Will Not Help — but the audience remained diverse. Only about half appeared to be human of some sort, with the Marshans, Odists, and Jonases accounting for most of those. I suppose it made sense, given the Odists' social circle, but that didn't quite tally with what I knew of Jonas's role in the leadership of the System. He didn't strike me as a furry.
+About twenty people had shown up. It didn't seem to be twenty clades --- there were two Odists, after all, with Dry Grass and another from the eighth stanza, Why Ask Questions When The Answers Will Not Help --- but the audience remained diverse. Only about half appeared to be human of some sort, with the Marshans, Odists, and Jonases accounting for most of those. I suppose it made sense, given the Odists' social circle, but that didn't quite tally with what I knew of Jonas's role in the leadership of the System. He didn't strike me as a furry.
 
 When asked over a sensorium message, Dry Grass replied, \emph{``The eighth stanza has been slowly tamping down on Jonas's role over the years. He has not been nearly as grounded as he once was. Prime quit in grand fashion some years back, and the rest have long since recognized that.''} She cast a slight smile in my direction, adding, \emph{``Too singularly focused, perhaps. All work and no play makes Jonas lose his fucking marbles.''}
 
@@ -192,11 +192,11 @@ The systech chuckled nervously, nodding. ``Well, alright. Then yeah, Jonas has i
 
 ``And who is this `someone'?'' Selena asked. ``The phys-side feeds are being ungated, but it's a firehose of information to sort through to try and find anything of use.''
 
-``Yeah, I think they — the System Consortium — clamped down pretty tight. I'm just learning about this myself, since I just got access to the files a few hours ago and news from Earth's been censored. Let's see\ldots{}'' She frowned, continued in the tone of someone reading aloud, ``Okay. The Our Brightest Lights Collective claimed responsibility for the attack exactly thirty seconds \emph{before} it occurred via a message to every executive on the System Consortium board, as well as several major feeds, all of which were censored before being made public. The OBLC named the mechanism, provided a detailed timeline of events, and offered a list of names of individuals — or''individuals'', I guess — and their roles in the execution of this plan. All one hundred members of the collective have been apprehended, though in the past year, two have managed to end their own lives.''
+``Yeah, I think they --- the System Consortium --- clamped down pretty tight. I'm just learning about this myself, since I just got access to the files a few hours ago and news from Earth's been censored. Let's see\ldots{}'' She frowned, continued in the tone of someone reading aloud, ``Okay. The Our Brightest Lights Collective claimed responsibility for the attack exactly thirty seconds \emph{before} it occurred via a message to every executive on the System Consortium board, as well as several major feeds, all of which were censored before being made public. The OBLC named the mechanism, provided a detailed timeline of events, and offered a list of names of individuals --- or''individuals'', I guess --- and their roles in the execution of this plan. All one hundred members of the collective have been apprehended, though in the past year, two have managed to end their own lives.''
 
 Answers Will Not Help spoke up during a break in the recitation. ``Is there more information on this collective? Are they conservatives? How tight is their integration? Do they mimic clades like the old-style collectives?''
 
-``Oh, uh, one moment, I'll look that up once I'm finished,'' Günay said. ``It goes on to say that, through investigation, members from some other collectives and several individuals besides were implicated and were also detained. During one of the System restarts between the Century Attack — as we've been calling it — and now, this information was confirmed by having an investigator sys-side fork rapidly to gather information and take action where needed. They were provided with emergency global ACLs and, once they found the perpetrator, they locked them in an unpopulated airlocked implementation of the System.''
+``Oh, uh, one moment, I'll look that up once I'm finished,'' Günay said. ``It goes on to say that, through investigation, members from some other collectives and several individuals besides were implicated and were also detained. During one of the System restarts between the Century Attack --- as we've been calling it --- and now, this information was confirmed by having an investigator sys-side fork rapidly to gather information and take action where needed. They were provided with emergency global ACLs and, once they found the perpetrator, they locked them in an unpopulated airlocked implementation of the System.''
 
 ``The System was restarted more than once?'' Debarre asked, taken aback.
 
@@ -262,7 +262,7 @@ An uncomfortable murmur interrupted her.
 
 Dry Grass smiled kindly. ``Of course, Günay. What did they say in return?''
 
-``To us? A lot of panicked messages requesting as many updates we could give them. Of course, by then, the messages were eight months out of date, and we'd been sending them hourly updates on the status of Lagrange for quite a while. They were broken down into buckets based on content: personal, political, technical, and vague threats.'' She smiled wryly. ``I only really know all of that because I was privy to the technical bucket. Systechs on both of the LVs teamed up and started throwing ideas at us as fast as they could. They were mostly not any help, given the delay, but some of them were useful — especially the Artemisians. They brought casualties down from 15\%.''
+``To us? A lot of panicked messages requesting as many updates we could give them. Of course, by then, the messages were eight months out of date, and we'd been sending them hourly updates on the status of Lagrange for quite a while. They were broken down into buckets based on content: personal, political, technical, and vague threats.'' She smiled wryly. ``I only really know all of that because I was privy to the technical bucket. Systechs on both of the LVs teamed up and started throwing ideas at us as fast as they could. They were mostly not any help, given the delay, but some of them were useful --- especially the Artemisians. They brought casualties down from 15\%.''
 
 I started to do the math in my head, but Harvey blurted out, ``345 \emph{billion!} Holy shit! You've gotta be fucking kidding me.''
 
@@ -294,7 +294,7 @@ She held up her hands defensively. ``Hey, like I said, it's just a change, and I
 
 ``I am sorry, Günay,'' Dry Grass said. ``You are right that that is a conversation for another time. Tell us about these ACL improvements and merging improvements. Those are likely to be the most relevant to everyone here.''
 
-``Right,'' she said, frowning. ``Well, the ACL improvements allow locking cladists within sims. We needed this to contain the perpetrator as quickly as possible, but left it in place. We came up with a suggested protocol with the ethics committee, though, that would mean a two step approval process — phys-side and sys-side — as well as a mandatory waiting period. It's disabled for now, but we can re-enable it whenever.
+``Right,'' she said, frowning. ``Well, the ACL improvements allow locking cladists within sims. We needed this to contain the perpetrator as quickly as possible, but left it in place. We came up with a suggested protocol with the ethics committee, though, that would mean a two step approval process --- phys-side and sys-side --- as well as a mandatory waiting period. It's disabled for now, but we can re-enable it whenever.
 
 ``The merge improvements involve finer-grained conflict management, which is more just an efficiency thing; we're told nothing changed subjectively. We also enabled cross-tree merging.''