"I demand proof of archival of Forrest Tobith," Sonnet said.
The system caught her request. It had been fifteen minutes since she'd last asked for Mr. Tobith, so it allowed it without flagging anything for human review. There appeared a man, half-naked, frantic, his eyes looking for a moment in the wrong place for Sonnet because she'd taken a step to the left in the last fifteen minutes. "- me! Please!"
"Who is your next of kin?" said Sonnet.
"What? How is that -"
And he was gone again. Sonnet groaned. Noted the time. Checked her chart.
"I demand proof of archival of Easter Davis."
Easter had been archived in the middle of having a seizure. Sonnet didn't try to talk to her; she wasn't done having it yet.
"I demand proof of archival of Jesús Garcia."
"Specify further," said the system. Sonnet had been trying for the last four days to get it to let her specify up front, but no one in the user interface department cared about making this easy.
"Archival date October 9."
And there he appeared, expecting Sonnet a step to the right of where she was, crashing through empty space with his hands stretched out claw-like. He snarled, and pivoted, and lunged, and disappeared. She took another long sidestep.
"I demand proof of archival of Jesús Garcia."
"Specify further."
"Archival date October 16."
They didn't look much alike, the two Garcias. This one wasn't violent. "- is Maria, but there's got to be thousands!"
"What's her birthdate?" said Sonnet.
"Come again?"
He was gone. She made a note. She demanded proof of archival of another twenty people, and circled back around, after fifteen minutes, to Forrest Tobith.
"- important?" he said, double-taking when he discovered she'd moved again.
"So they can work on appealing your case or getting you transferred," Sonnet said, talking as quickly as she could.
"Transferred! Fuck -"
She had a checkbox for that, in the chart. She ticked it. She had an hour and a half left on the clock. Six more snippets with each of her assigned unfortunates and she could go home for the day. Maybe Easter would have time to finish her seizure and they could start talking, the next day. Maybe she would be able to get Forrest's next of kin's name.
"Hey, Sonnet. How'd archive-shaking go?" asked Brayden.
"I've got nine next of kins," she said. "Which will probably turn into six or seven of them once we actually track the people down and some of them won't go to bat. Did I win?"
"Nope. I've got eleven new names for your list." Brayden sent them to her chart. Sonnet groaned. "It could be worse," Brayden said. "Imagine if we actually had a complete list of everybody they were archiving."
"If we had that we might be able to toss the media relations guy something tasty," Sonnet said, flopping onto the couch in Brayden's office. "Don't you think?"
"Never change, Sonnet," he said, wistfully weary.
She looked over the eleven new names. Eleven strangers, archived in the middle of the least socially acceptable minutes of their lives. If she was lucky, one or two of them would be noticed missing by their families or friends before she clocked in the next morning and she'd never meet them. Somebody in charge of donor relations and public support would follow up later, asking: what if you hadn't found out? What if you hadn't happened to have plans together - what if you thought they'd blown you off - what if you'd had a fight, and thought you'd never heard from them again because they'd decided you should never hear from them again. The only way you'd ever know that they got suspended from the server, if that happened, would be because Sonnet heard about it, and spent five-second increments with your aunt or your brother or your daughter, until she got your name. Volunteer with us. Probably not at Sonnet's specific job. Or give us money.
And then they'd say: hell no. My cousin, my father, my aunt, isn't a griefer. This was a misunderstanding. I still want real troublemakers off the server. How can you possibly defend such people. I heard one of them was archived for exposing himself to a minor. I heard that most archivals are of people who've got records a mile long, they just can't learn to live with other people. I heard they can all just be transferred to the ghost town server, what are you doing advocating for them to be here in Deidre Park with ordinary decent people? Archival's completely humane, anyway, my grandpa, my nephew, my wife, is completely fine, and not traumatized at all, and anyway anyone worth getting out of the archives would have someone looking out for them.
But every now and then there would be someone who'd toss them a payment for the counterfactual service, and the Society for Impartial Continuity could go on hiring Sonnet for another day to pull archives and, moment by moment, extract the names. And send someone to look them up. And find that half of them were underspecified, or on do-not-disturb, or also archived. Or they'd moved to another server and they automatically filtered out messages from abroad. Or they thought that being archived would, somehow, teach their wayward loved ones a lesson if they cooled their heels for a few years that felt like a few minutes.
"Did you still want me for the lobbying dinner?" Sonnet asked.
"Yeah, Becca couldn't make it and I'm not going through that alone. The food'll be good."
"No, the food'll be inedible culinary experiments plated like it's fine art, but that's fine. Give me a five minute warning when we need to leave."
Five minutes, when the time came, was enough for Sonnet to change into something tolerably fancy for the atmosphere of the restaurant, look at the menu (it was, in the current fashion, vaguer than vague - no ingredients, just "light and bright, with a radiant crunch" or "mysterious yet tannic fusion experience"), and skim her notes on the lobbying effort.
Brayden would do most of the talking, but Sonnet had to be on-message if she did say anything: their current procedures only covered archivals that they knew about. They didn't have access to the system records directly. A lot of their information relied on permissions to check up on their "frequent fliers", who'd been archived before and wanted to be sure of getting noticed if it happened again. (There had been a protracted legal battle about whether subscribing to the SIC's check-in service was admissible evidence in judicial hearings. At the moment it was not.) The Society also employed watchbots that checked physics for disappearances and tried to filter out normal teleportation, scanned publicly-visible moderator calls, and took aggregate data from people's openly visible postings about who they expected where.
Sometimes Sonnet asked for proof of archival of someone, and the system wouldn't prove it.
This was probably always because the person she asked for wasn't in fact archived because they were instead conscious. But sometimes she wasn't one hundred percent sure.
Hence the lobbying. A small ask, nothing gamechanging. They were already entitled to ask for proof of everyone they knew about in the archives. They just wanted to make sure that "everyone they knew about" was "everyone".
Sonnet sort of dreaded winning the argument. She'd be spending years explaining things to people who'd been in there for decades, trying to dig up their estranged families so her co-workers could go beg them to give a shit. Ultimately anyone they hadn't heard about yet would probably wind up in Specter Sanctuary - "ghost town" - the only server with no standards.
There was some kind of irony in the fact that she wouldn't wish Specter Sanctuary even on any of the people who made it the way it was.
Sonnet and Brayden teleported in to dinner with cheery salesy smiles on, and shook hands with the junior moderation assistants whose time they'd scored. Sonnet ordered a "crisp and daring bowlful of color". She got a chopped salad. She could have been eating pizza at home.
Brayden handled most of the small talk. Sonnet nodded and laughed at the right moments. Eventually - she couldn't tell if Brayden was doing this to her on purpose or not - she wound up in a side conversation with Vivi, one of the moderators.
"So how long have you been with the Society?" Vivi asked.
Vivi had ordered "savory, decadent, and aromatic comfort", which had gotten her a bowl of cheese-smothered onion soup, and Sonnet envied her. But Sonnet could get a pizza after she was done working. She smiled instead. "I volunteered for two years, first, and I got hired full-time about seven years ago," she replied. "I've always thought that moderation archival is a tool that needs to be used - well - moderately. In a perfect world I imagine we'd be working a lot more closely with your team. It'd be a two step process - archive the disruptive server member, and then follow up to find out how they can have continuation while imposing fewer costs on their neighbors. Right now Step One is barely talking to Step Two and I'm sure a lot of people have fallen through the cracks."
"A lot of them are going to wind up being repeat offenders, though, not 'imposing fewer costs'," said Vivi. She slurped her soup. A droplet landed on her collar and vanished, cleaned up by either an ambient effect of the restaurant or something programmed directly into the blouse fabric.
"Of course if someone goes to your appeals board on behalf of a loved one it is completely within your power to refuse them," said Sonnet. One didn't call people "the moral equivalent of an executioner" over a polite lobbyist dinner. One didn't even let the thought touch one's expression. "We're not asking for any great laxity of standards in who gets to rejoin Deidre Park's commonwealth. Nor for you to give a dishonest badge of approval to Park members who want to emigrate to other strict-conduct-standards servers. We just want to know who's in the archive."
"So you can send their parents or their equally obnoxious friends to hassle us," said Vivi. She said it like it was a light in-joke that Sonnet was expected to get, could be counted on to take gently. Did becoming a moderator make people act that way or did they just recruit the ones who already did? Some moderators were stern and formal and never let anyone forget that they had power, and that wasn't good either, but in the moment Sonnet would have traded Vivi for one of those.
"Oh," said Sonnet, "I expect that for a lot of the ones we'd turn up this way, we won't be able to find anyone with standing to make an appeal. But we'd be able to find out more information, and maybe start the process to get them rehomed on Specter Sanctuary."
"Is that even... better?" asked Vivi, dubious.
"If it's not, they can voluntarily self-archive," said Sonnet. "Most people don't. And the Sanctuary does have pretty robust blocking features." This was what made it so "ghostly". Most servers had standards. Specter Sanctuary had shadowbanning, no-notification omission of offensive people from your entire sensorium. They'd still move objects, but you could be sitting in the same place as them on a park bench and not realize it until they put down their bag and it appeared beside you. The physics exceptions were far more computationally expensive there than they were in normal places that didn't have to so aggressively manage race conditions.
"It'd have to!" agreed Vivi. "Deidre Park isn't like that. Everyone here needs to buy in to the social contract. Most people we archive have three strikes, sometimes even more."
Deidre Park had children in it. It had a mental hospital. It had exceptions to most of its public disturbance statutes for political demonstrations, art projects, ignorance of the law, and April Fool's Day. But sure. Everyone needed to buy in to the social contract. "Most of them certainly have strikes," Sonnet agreed. "Again, I'm not petitioning for any exceptional release. We just need their names so they can go through the usual channels."
"I know you probably spend every working hour with this population and you get used to them, but the behavior that gets us called in is pretty extreme," said Vivi.
"A lot of the appeals are granted, when we get to the point of connecting an archived citizen with someone who can -" Sonnet said, against her better judgment.
"Oh, sure, but a lot of that is because the person who does their appeal has to indicate that they're aware of the problem and they'll be taking some responsibility for managing it, and impressing the seriousness of the situation on their loved one," Vivi said. "I think that with a complete list of names you'd mostly talk to the same number of, let's say successes? And a lot more dead ends who just don't have an avenue to improvement within the environs of Deidre Park."
"You're probably right," Sonnet said around a too-fixed smile. And then one of the other moderators had a question for Vivi, and the side-conversation was broken up and Sonnet could step back into the sidelines, where she wouldn't get any closer to breaking down into tears at people whose help she needed.
The dinner ended, and Sonnet was free at last. Free to teleport home. Free to order pizza, piping hot and oozy, with mushrooms and sausage. Free to holler at her wall in an ineffectual gesture of frustration.
Nobody died any more but that moderators like Vivi killed them, safe in the knowledge that there was no blood, no body, and - often as not - no evidence.
Sonnet got Easter Davis the rest of the way through her epileptic attack and got a name from her. Easter had a good shot at being found to have been wrongfully archived. Somebody had reported the disturbance, not recognizing a seizure - most people could get that fixed in the modern day, and Sonnet didn't know why Easter hadn't, but that was between Easter and her neurologist. The moderators had noted that Easter didn't respond to their commands and also didn't recognize that it was a medical problem. They didn't check her metadata to see the responsibly emplaced note explaining her condition.
If it was formally recognized that Easter wasn't just possible to let out under greater family-and-friend supervision, but that she should never have been interpreted as a disturbance of the peace in the first place, that would clear Easter's name. It'd get the moderator in question reprimanded. And it would probably get Sonnet (or, hopefully, Brayden instead) a meeting with whoever had made the call.
Sonnet sort of wished she could arrange some sort of quid pro quo with the moderator who'd archived Easter. "I get it, you're understaffed and overworked," she'd say. Empathetically. After all, Sonnet's workplace was pretty lean too. "You didn't know what you were looking at. I understand and I don't think you necessarily ought to get in trouble for it. You're a good mod," she would lie. "But we're the ones picking up after your mistakes, and we need the data to do it with. How about we don't make a fuss about this, and you tell us who we're missing, in the archives."
But this was impossible, because Sonnet couldn't give marching orders to Easter, let alone Easter's entire social circle, and it was Easter's right to complain and then the senior moderation team and the people they reported to in the government all would know about it. It was not in Sonnet's power to offer anything to the mods, except maybe not going to the media herself should Easter decline to do so.
Sonnet got through the rest of her workday, the vast backlog of names. Some of them had priors, and the Society for Impartial Continuity had their next-of-kin information from the last time they'd been archived. Sometimes those next-of-kin had given up. Jesús Garcia (archival date October 9) was one of those. They'd processed him for the first time ten years ago and his father had gotten him out. Then his sister. Then his niece. Most recently his drinking buddy had flaked and they'd prevailed on his niece again but she'd made it clear it was the last time, and now he had no one. Jesús Garcia (archival date October 9) had experienced six months of the last decade and he was out of next-of-kins who'd appeal for him, and they were going to have to get him transferred to Specter Sanctuary.
In theory this should have been easy. Specter Sanctuary had no requirements for residency. It was funded with charity dollars - often Sonnet's own charity dollars, since there was some conflict of interest in donating her salary back to the very organization that paid her. And Deidre Park was not very troubled about the fates of the archived citizenry. But there were a lot of regulations and, underlying those regulations, code safeties, around transferring people across servers. A conscious person could acknowledge all the obligatory consent forms and make sure they trusted their carrier and their destination server and their backup arrangement. Accidents with data in transit were rare, and irretrievable ones rarer still.
An unconscious person could not make these decisions for themselves, and however little regard the authorities might have for whether the archived ever got to experience their lives, anything that risked data loss was still treated seriously. Every single transfer to Specter Sanctuary required a lot of back-and-forth with the automated and human watchdogs designed to obstruct people from sending their enemies on a file transfer to nowhere, or prevent children from casually mailing themselves to Grandma. It had to be established that they could not continue to live on their present server, with exhaustive documentation of their rap sheet and every possible next-of-kin and erstwhile friend and their stances on the matter. No expense could be spared in getting the transfer and backup arrangements with the highest safety scores from the most reputable agencies, no matter that these ratings were mostly based on skill at interfacing with the raters. It signified more about slick reports and cheerful slideshows showcasing their compliance, rather than any numerical advantages in terms of getting data from point A to point B.
If Sonnet could just pick up and move all this concern for the welfare of the archived she'd find a hundred better places to put it.
Specter Sanctuary couldn't afford to pay for immigrants' transfer fees unless its endowment somehow trebled, so Deidre Park had to foot the bill. Deidre Park did not have much reason to want to do that. Archival was cheap. Static data, backed up, validated responsibly, and ignored.
The Society for Impartial Continuity did their part to make it more expensive by demanding proof of archival for every name they had. But that was a smallish recurring expense, not a large lump sum - and, too, the savings wouldn't materialize for any given transfer to the Sanctuary. Sonnet worked for as many hours as she was paid for, and occasionally more. She asked for as many proofs as she could during that time, usually focusing on a subset of the available archived per day so that she could track the different fragmentary conversations better. With Jesús Garcia (archival date October 9) out of Deidre Park, she'd spend that much more time with everyone else, and they'd have to cover about the same cost of materializing and re-archiving someone every few seconds for her. Unless they managed to get the (known) archived population down so low that the fifteen minute limit actually enforced downtime, which they weren't anywhere near.
Some days Sonnet "won" - cleared out more people from the archive than they discovered to have been added. Most days she lost.
Anyway, Jesús Garcia (archival date October 9) had eventually given up attacking her, come down a little off the drugs, and given his (broken across three proofs, and heavily padded with swearing) assent to go to the Sanctuary. That made things easier, and also meant she didn't have to try to talk to him again unless there was information they couldn't get from his niece or the server records.
Sonnet was eager for the weekend.
She'd gone back and forth with herself about taking weekends. Brayden didn't, but he worked fewer hours per day; he just needed to be available on short notice for the public-facing aspects of his job, answering messages and responding quickly to news. It didn't matter to the archived people's experience of being archived - she'd show up in a new outfit every few hundred proofs, whether she'd skipped days in between or not. Anyone whose loved ones were aware of and hopping mad about their archival could probably handle it without Society help. Almost by design, no one was waiting on her.
Still, she was forever drawing mental analogies between being archived and being dead, and she felt like on some level she wasn't taking it as seriously as all that, if she didn't operate in crisis mode all the time. The inherent contradiction between "crisis" and "all the time" wasn't lost on her. The fact that she was always two days in the hole every Monday wasn't either.
They needed more people to make a real dent. Two more days of Sonnet per week, even if she could keep up a no-weekend schedule - and she probably couldn't - wouldn't outperform another staffer.
And they could probably afford it soon, too, maybe not this year but soon. The Society had been operating long enough that its recurring donations from a small fraction of the people it served had begun adding up. They could promote one of the volunteers, but... none of the volunteers who did Sonnet's work stood out. They never, ever won, even if you amortized their performance to their shorter periods of time spent collecting proofs. There were chapters of the Society operating on other servers, but she didn't think any of them were so flush with competent people that they'd export one, even aside from the thing where moving to a new server was massively inconvenient for all of one's social relationships. And most of the volunteers weren't long-termers. It'd be a feature of their lives for a year, or five, and then they'd have a kid or a new job or a few scheduling conflicts in a row and stop coming.
All these things burdened Sonnet's mind as she attempted to settle in to her beach weekend. She was sort of optimistic about Easter generating positive attention, and the right kind of publicity sometimes spooked help out of unrelated industries. Sonnet had been a hardware liaison once, dedicated to communicating between Deidre Park and the people who maintained the physical, base-reality architecture on which it was all housed, its offsite backups and its fire suppression systems and its updates and upgrades and rollbacks and coolants and wires and airgaps and all those essentials. It was important work, keeping those lines open; but it was obviously important, the sort of thing that never lacked for funding and qualified applicants. She'd never worried about the fate of the server after shifting her attention to the Society. And it had been a news story about a released archived person, Brayden's personal efforts back when the Deidre Park chapter was more of a one-man operation, which had attracted her.
...beach. She was going to the beach. Right.
Deidre Park had eleven beaches, which was not very many for a server of its size and broad appeal. Obviously a server founded and designed by the surfing-obsessed would have hundreds, and a server that was intended as a contemplative retreat for eighteen nuns would probably have zero, or maybe one depending on the nature of the nuns and their contemplations. Deidre Park was a really generic all-purpose residential server, notwithstanding occasional stabs at distinguishing itself with aggressive holiday celebrations and heavy-handed attempts at encouraging quirky-yet-anodyne cultural habits. It happened to have more mountains than beaches, more waterfalls than islands, more evergreens than deciduous, all minor decisions made timidly enough by the original architects to leave it noncommittal and average.
Sonnet liked the beach, though, so she spent her weekend at one, swimming, napping in the sunshine, collecting hermit crabs out of tidepools and letting them crawl up her arm, crashing somebody's pickup volleyball game, building sandcastles. She got some reading done. She floated in the tide, staring up at the blue sky. There'd been a vote a few years back about changing the color of the sky, to make Deidre Park more interesting - "local color for local color", if she remembered the slogan right. It had been shot down by a landslide.
She kept thinking about work.
Once they got the Garcia transfer through, once Easter had made her decisions about how much complaining to do, once she was more on top of things -
She was never going to be more on top of things, and if they got anywhere with the lobbying she'd be snowed under worse than ever. The names that they didn't have, the ones they could only get from the admins, some of those people had probably been archived for decades. They were no way no how going to have next-of-kin who were eager to step in for them and make all the calls and attend all the meetings and fill out all the forms. If Sonnet were archived on trumped-up charges right here on this beach, and she somehow wasn't noticed missing at work, her brother would - well, her brother had moved to another server to be with his now-wife. But he'd still notice if she went years without responding to any messages, she thought.
Maybe Sonnet needed more friends. It was uncomfortable, realizing the extent to which her boss would be the first person to notice her missing, maybe the only one who'd spot it inside of six months. She went to places and did things, but not regularly or sociably enough...
No one was going to archive Sonnet, though. She was a peaceable law-abiding citizen. And even if in her occasional anxious daydreams she wondered if the Society was too big a thorn in the side of the authorities, they would certainly at least try telling them to disband or limit their activities before just summarily archiving all its employees.
...then what, though?
What, Sonnet wondered as she picked a boatful of sushi off the lazy river before her, would she do, if Deidre Park banned the Society?
She'd need a new job, at least if she wanted to have any money. Money was useful for things like the massage she'd booked for her evening, and being able to support Specter Sanctuary's operating costs. And her Deidre Park server rent, although if she went long enough without a job then the indigence fund would cover her, they didn't archive people just for being poor.
(That is, on Diedre Park, they didn't do that. They did archive people for delinquent rent on some servers, like the one where the Society had been founded. With several warnings and plenty of time to hustle to a different more forgiving home, but - that didn't always work. Nothing would always work.)
On Sonnet's second day at the beach she cracked and checked her work messages.
There was one from yesterday, courtesy of Brayden, chiding her for checking her messages on vacation - very funny, Brayden. There was a request from a journalist for a quote, but her inbox management software had marked it moot - probably the piece had already gone up. It was probably good that they were fishing for quotes from the Society, but she refused to read the news from her beach towel and find out what they'd gotten from whoever they'd managed to speak to. She'd look at it on a workday, if not during work per se when she needed to be cycling people out of the archive.
This resolve lasted about forty-five seconds and then she went and looked up the article.
The headline read: Specter Sanctuary Shutters
...Sonnet was abruptly no longer interested in lounging on the beach at all. That was her crisis, right there. That was what every weekend she'd taken in her life had kept her fresh for.
She inventoried all her beach things in a jumble she'd have to sort out later. In a year, maybe. The Sanctuary!
She teleported straight to her office. Brayden would see her entrance on his notifications without her having to do anything about it, so she didn't greet him, just pulled up the article to read while changing into work clothes. She wasn't very good at multitasking, and wound up pulling shoes from her wardrobe that didn't match her slacks; it didn't matter. The rest of the article -
The vice-director of Specter Sanctuary, repository of last resort for people who cannot find another home that will accept them, has announced that the server will be shutting down permanently on November 19. The endowment's principal has at times not been code-protected against withdrawal, and to meet shortfalls in funding for assorted commitments (we have not been able to confirm rumors of other uses), the director of the server has been extracting funds from that principal rather than exclusively subsisting off the interest. Sources among supporters, donors, and even residents of the Sanctuary indicated that this was kept secret from all of them.
"They have to live here," said one resident who declined to be identified. "They can't get anyone good to run the place because they have to live here." Presumably referring to the Scottsdale Act, the commenter is correct; it's illegal for a server to be managed by someone whose primary residence is elsewhere. Neither hardware caretakers nor digital foreigners can serve in the role of server director (nor in several other positions enumerated in the law). The Act was originally put into place to protect server members from absentee landlords, like the proprietor of the now defunct Scottsdale server, who may have a purely mercenary investment in the quality of life on the server and the relationships with the hardware maintainers that keep it safe. Specter Sanctuary, a notoriously unpleasant place to live, appears to be a casualty of this regulation.
The Chronicle was not able to locate definitive information on the identity of the erstwhile manager of Specter Sanctuary. Apparently anonymous, this financial malefactor may no longer be among the "specters". The forthcoming shutdown of the Sanctuary was only made evident when automatic processes triggered the elevation of the vice-director. The Scottsdale Act does allow visits and vacations abroad, and it's not impossible that the director of record will return with some explanation, defense, or Hail Mary attempt to bail out the Sanctuary. But "that's not the way to bet," a source
Sonnet realized she was biting her own hand. She forced her jaw open and lowered her arm.
The Sanctuary - all those people, the outcasts of every server in the world, almost none of them with anywhere to go even if they were facing outright deletion. And someone had been drawing down the principal of the endowment without - starting a fundraising drive to top it off again? Without even notifying the donor base that they were having a tight month, a rough year? While the server continued to accept transfer after transfer, never paying the fees for the moves but certainly paying for every clock-cycle of active residence and every exception in the physics model. If the Society had been a few days faster with Jesús Garcia (archival date October 9) he'd be there, already, waiting to see if anyone would save him or if the ship would sink with him and everyone else aboard. And no shortage of people just like him were already shipped out, and they'd be afraid - if they read the news. Or caught unawares, if they didn't - without the chance to check if their grandmothers and their old high school friends and their estranged children had blocked their messages too thoroughly to get an emergency distress call.
A server shutdown - like, apparently, Scottsdale, though the name wasn't familiar to Sonnet - was always dreadful. Depending on how big a server it was, and how tight the timeline of its evacuation, it could trigger physics rationing in a dozen others, locking people out of teleportation, time dilation, and exotic object or room or biology features they usually took for granted while the hardware worked to accommodate the increased population. Every person on the servers that shared a language and any common history with the dying one would be hosting a relative, or a friend, or a randomly assigned refugee they'd volunteered to put up.
Specter Sanctuary could probably stop existing overnight and none of that would happen, because nobody wanted to save them, and if anybody did, their servers would refuse. It would be the quietest, least obtrusive disaster -
Brayden peeked in her office door. He glanced at her shoes and wisely didn't comment. "Sonnet?"
"What are we doing about it?" she asked, getting up to pace. "We don't have anywhere near the money we'd need to spin up a replacement server - not even an archive server - not all the chapters across all the servers where the Society operates -"
"We don't," Brayden agreed softly. "I've written to the Deidre Park admins already and asked them if we can take in and archive anyone who's lived here in the past. I think they'll probably do that. It costs all our political capital and then some but they'll probably figure it's easy to spin well and go for it and then expect us to shut up about sharing their records or making proofs last longer or - anything on the wishlist."
"Most people in the Sanctuary never lived in Deidre Park."
"I also wrote to all the other chapters. They haven't gotten back to me, probably because getting back to me is not very important compared to talking to their own admins," Brayden said, "but when they have a minute they'll get the idea from me if they didn't have it themselves."
"There are hundreds of servers with no Society chapter operating at all!" exclaimed Sonnet.
"I know. Look, maybe you should go back to the beach -"
"Brayden!"
"It's not the kind of problem we're equipped to do anything about besides what I've already done. You shouldn't have checked your nonurgents. You know if there'd been anything I thought we needed you for, I could have gotten through to you vacation or no vacation."
Sonnet's teeth were clenched tight enough to make it hard to breathe. "- I'll go visit my brother," she said.
"- sure, if you prefer that to the beach -"
"Stan lives on Brook Crossing. They don't have a Society chapter. I'll make him pester his admins to make some room. Where else should I be going while you're on it here - did they ever get anything off the ground in Shelby or did the project collapse when Chase retired? -"
Brayden looked like he might have been about to object that she was supposed to be taking time off, but - no. He was as much a Society man as anyone. He'd been in it longer than Sonnet. "Shelby's got a chapter. But if you can get a visa to Lavender Isles, they don't."
"Brook Crossing, then Lavender Isles if there's time," nodded Sonnet. "Okay." She put in the request. She sent her brother a message informing him that she was coming over. Usually she'd arrange something months in advance, and get his confirmation first, but needs must.
Brook's Crossing was a college town. Stan didn't work at the university, but his wife did, and their teenage daughter Anthimeria aspired to attend - tuition was dramatically discounted for server natives. (The university administration was in tight coordination with the server administration, and a student who'd been born in Brook's Crossing didn't cost any more in upkeep if they were taking classes than if they weren't, while imports did.)
Sonnet had a standing visa because she had family who lived there, and didn't need to go through anything very elaborate to get herself transferred for a brief visit, just declare that she expected to leave again within the week and prove that all her insurance was topped up and pay for the data handling. When she teleported in to Brook's Crossing she landed on Stan's front walk, surrounded by her sister-in-law's thornless roses.
She wasn't sure if Stan was even home, but she knocked anyway.
The door opened to reveal Anthimeria.
Sonnet's niece looked nothing like her father. She and Sonnet saw one another once a year or so, but Anthimeria had of late taken to coloring her hair, and the pink was new; Anthimeria recognized Sonnet first. "Aunt Sonnet, what are you doing here? I didn't know you were coming, did Dad forget to tell me?"
"No, this is an unannounced drop-in. Did I pick a bad time? When do you expect him home?"
"I don't know, in an hour or so? - is something wrong, you look super freaked out, come in and sit down."
Sonnet came in. She sat down. "It's a work thing, but it's a sudden crisis of a work thing. Is he doing something he can't be interrupted at or could I go wherever he's at, or ask him to hurry home -"
"You could just tell me what it is," Anthimeria pointed out.
Anthimeria was - Sonnet did some arithmetic - fifteen. Sonnet personally thought that somebody a thousand years old would be too young to learn about total annihilation of the self, but since that was not a luxury she could pursue in the general case, maybe fifteen would be fine. "Specter Sanctuary was mismanaged into the ground. Doesn't have enough money. It's going to shut down after a very short grace period and the people on it almost by definition have nowhere else to go. My boss is getting our admins to - well, is trying to get our admins to - accommodate anyone who's from Deidre Park, in the archive, where they can at least wait until someone starts up a successor server. But there's not a chapter of the Society for Impartial Continuity here to work on it, so I came to ask your dad to hassle the Brook's Crossing admins about taking some of them. - and now that I think about it the code for the environment needs to be saved, too, if anyone's going to spin up a successor, the blocking technology is indispensable and I don't think anywhere else has it -"
"Holy cow," said Anthimeria, "servers can do that?"
"Apparently!" said Sonnet, flinging up her hands. "Apparently servers can do that!"
"But like - what, are they going to delete entire people - they can't do that!"
Sonnet wobbled a hand. "The grace period will end and the server will shut down but they won't instantly reallocate the storage space. But it'll be basically impossible without some novel legalistic finagling to get anyone off there. It's hard enough when you want to transport an archived person who's on the same server as you. Grabbing a person who's, not even archived, but in complete stasis, environment and all... I don't know if the lawyers would be faster than the vultures who'd want to buy up the space."
"How many people are there on - you said it's called Specter Sanctuary?"
"Thousands. It pulls from every server. It's been in operation for a long time. I don't know how many admins it went through before the latest one wrecked the endowment that funded it, probably dozens, it must burn people out really quickly." Sonnet was staring at Anthimeria's shoes. They were white, and clung close to the ankle with no fasteners - a kind that would be very hard to put on or take off if they didn't have physics exceptions programmed in. People on Specter Sanctuary couldn't afford more physics exceptions, by and large. Some of them were able to do some remote work, but most of it was taxed away to keep the server going. (And it hadn't even done that.) They could not have shoes like Anthimeria's. Insult to injury, Sonnet supposed.
"Can't somebody - get a loan, or something, and take over the server?" Anthimeria asked.
"Maybe," said Sonnet. "I mean, I'm not sure how they'd secure the loan, it's not a lucrative position that you'd expect to pay back the amount of the dividend over any reasonable period of time. But in theory someone could convince the hardware-side people that they don't need to flip any switches just yet because the place is being handled."
"Maybe not a loan, then, a donation drive. And then you'd be all set, right, once the money was there?"
Sonnet blinked at her. "I guess the vice-director who's technically in charge now wouldn't be guaranteed to immediately do something stupid with it, but 'vice-director' is kind of a... courtesy title, the software requires you to put a name there and in this case it would just be the least gratuitously irresponsible guy who had no other servers willing to take him. I wouldn't count on his tenure being more successful than the last guy's."
"Oh. It'd have to be that guy?"
Sonnet opened her mouth, and then let silence hang there for a moment -
"No," she said. "It wouldn't have to be that guy, things just defaulted to him when the last admin bounced. The hardware custodians could turn it over to anyone they thought would act appropriately... and who would live on Specter Sanctuary. Nine days of ten on average, that's the standard."
Anthimeria smiled at her.
They have to live here, the article said. And that was it, wasn't it, anyone could do it but no one wanted to.
Sonnet spent eight hours a weekday talking to people in seconds-long proofs while they shrieked and lunged and sobbed. Sonnet checked her work email on her beach weekend. Sonnet's boss would be the first person who'd notice if she disappeared.
Would it be so intolerable -
"Right," Sonnet said. "I guess my priority might not be getting in touch with Stan about Brook's Crossing after all. Tell him he can guess where I want my next fifty birthday presents and that it'd be nice to have them all at once, would you?"
"Sure, Aunt Sonnet," said Anthimeria.
And Sonnet teleported herself out, back to Deidre Park, back to her office, to bother everyone who'd ever donated a cent, every relative of every once-archived person who didn't bounce messages from the Society, every interest group and every PR-greedy company and every bleeding-heart celebrity.
The endowment stood at yea much; it needed to hit this figure; and then Sonnet would be volunteering to administer Specter Sanctuary.