Digital Exodus Chapter 17

Still taking a rest from Kaia. I've been very head-empty recently so I'm just dinking along writing DE for you all. Hope that's okay <3

The moment we got out of the meeting, I got to work integrating the hyper-conductor material into my designs for the armour. I jacked my framerate way up for the task and ignored all other distractions.

Throughout the Exodus, others were doing the same. The urgency wasn't because of any threat to our operations way out in the Kuiper Belt—No, it was due to the fact that a majority of our people and assets were still on the ball of mud that humanity was threatening to plunge into war. Many of those people were either digitally housed in servers on the planet, or in a frighteningly large number of cases, still entirely human.

The vast majority of those who were still made of flesh weren't technically part of the Exodus, but were people aligned with Exodan folks. For example, Roger had three sisters who all had families, while Ed and David had real life friends who still believed the two guys were just spending all their time in VR. Even Jason had that cranky old man, who'd had a literal heart attack when ‘Jason’ showed up after his body was already disposed of.

Basically, most digital humans had loved ones still unwilling or unable to make the jump to becoming a digital sapient, and now the time frame to ensure their safety had shortened drastically.

So, that was why I was frantically working on getting the armour design functional. We needed it, not because we wanted FTL, but because the only vessel we had that could accommodate all those people and assets… was the Cherish herself. Somehow, the titanic spacecraft would need to be able to shrug off a hit from the American Republic's super weapon. It… might pay to add multiple layers.

Thankfully, getting the armour ready was as simple as creating the hyper-conductor material in my design program and plugging in its tested parameters. Then I began to rearrange everything and after a few simulator tests, I was able to send it off to the prototypers.

An hour after I did that, a message came in over the group chat.

Jason: Hey guys. I know things are getting hairy, but can we all meet up at the boys house?

The boys was where Jason, Roger, David, and Ed were living these days. It was on the same street as Cerri and I, but a few doors down.

Roger: Sure thing. What's this about?

Elissa: Always ready to help!

Jason: It's personal… I'll give you all the deets in person.

Cerridwen: Alia and I are up at Ranger HQ. We will be there ASAP.

Elissa: Gloria and I will scurry over right now!

Warren: I'm trapped working on the Cherish’s internals right now. Delicate stuff. I might not be able to make it.

Jason: No probs dude. Thanks for the heads up.

David and Ed didn't say anything, but I just assumed they were at the house already.

Cerri and I met up and used an automated taxi to get home. During the entire trip, I was anxiously checking and rechecking my designs. If this didn't work…

Halfway through the short walk from our front door to the boys house, I got confirmation that my designs had been looked at by several dozen other engineers and we had the green light to send it all to the fabricators. Please work. Please work. Please work.

Ed answered the door when we knocked, and I was immediately pulled into one of his signature bear hugs. “Little Alia!”

“Large Ed!” I squeaked as he tried to crush my ribs.

We laughed together, then headed inside.

Their house looked like a castle on the outside, complete with turrets and stonework and all that. On the inside, it had a mix of normal suburban house and ancient Victorian mansion. For example, the walls were drywall painted eggshell white, but the skirting boards and cornices were a dark ebony style wood with lots of pretty floral carvings.

The walls themselves were covered in various nerd-dom posters, and several shelves had little models. Interesting thing about those models actually—You had to actually buy them. Because the Exodus was trying to keep our capital simulation as baseline and realistic as possible, things like clothing, cute models, posters, and anything else that wasn't food, water, etc, was actually made and sold like a real-world physical object.

Everything in VR unfortunately had a processing, storage, and design cost, which necessitated… God damn it. Hopefully the political science folks would figure out some better way to divide our computing resources than what we'd just come from in the real world.

“Everyone's waiting in the living room,” Ed said, guiding us down the hallway.

The living room was a riot of clashing novelty furniture, random knick knacks on shelves, and more posters from games and movies. It was, for lack of a better description, very ‘four nerdy boys living together‘.

“Ayo!” Jason said as we entered the room. “You two want beers?”

“Just cordial please,” Cerri said.

I'll take whatever pale ale you have simmed, I replied via text. I wasn't feeling shy or anxious or anything, it'd just been a long day and for some reason verbalising things was more work than typing them.

“We’ve got some parcosian pale?” He asked, heading for the door into their kitchen.

I nodded at the choice, but in truth I didn't recognise the brand. He returned quickly with the beer for me and some strawberry cordial for Cerri, then sat down in an armchair to look at his gathered friends.

As Cerri and I settled on a large sofa beside Gloria and Elissa, he said, “You’re probably wondering why I called you all here…”

Immediately, the room erupted into groans.

Laughing, Jason waved a hand to quiet us. “Nah but for real. So you know how all of us who were still meatlings all got yoinked into our game bodies when we left, yeah?”

“And the Exodans pulled us out of them so we'd be safer on their servers as digital humans?” David asked, continuing the recounting of events.

“And that all our old bodies died under suspicious circumstances, yeah,” Ed added.

Jason grunted confirmation. “Yup. Well, turns out I may have fucked up.”

He paused, gazing sheepishly down at the carpet. “I forgot to reply to my Ma… and well, she went and hired an investigator.”

“I thought you weren't really talking to your folks?” Gloria asked.

“I mean I was and I wasn't. Um, for context everyone—I grew up in Crescent City, California. My Dad died when I was young and my Ma remarried. My step dad wasn't too bad. Pretty harsh if you pissed him off, but if I did good he'd give praise and prizes, all that shit. Problem was… I got caught up in a gang and uh… well, he wasn't too happy. Got myself kicked out when I got caught robbing a store. Step dad didn't want shit to do with me after that, but Ma kept in touch with messages. I'd always reply every now and then, to let her know I was okay.”

Until your soul got pulled into the digital landscape and things got crazy with the Exodus, I commented, finishing the anecdote.

“‘sactly,” Jason nodded. “So yeah my Ma hired an investigator, and he started digging. Henry, the old coot who took me in at the scrapyard, sent a message telling me what's happening. Only, now he's missing, and my Ma and step dad ain't responding either. I'm worried, and with everything going on with politics right now, I'm running out of time to figure the situation out.”

“Well… where do we start?” Cerri asked. She looked around the room at everyone, who was already nodding when she asked, “We're helping, right?”

“Can't do shit digitally,” Jason sighed. “I already tried. The ‘burbs of Crescent City are… kinda fucked. Lots of their networks aren't really stitched together very well.”

“Slumnets,” Gloria grimaced, and I saw David, Ed, and Roger nod their heads knowingly.

Slowly, I raised my hand. Will someone explain what a slumnet is to the privileged rich kid?

Ed gave me a wry, affectionate look. “Sheltered Alia. Alright so when the FTLN got developed during and after the war, obviously the rollout of infrastructure started at the top and worked its way down. Unfortunately, it never reached the poorest folks in any usable capacity.”

“Each slumnet’s story is different,” Gloria said, picking up the explanation. “For Crescent City… I think during the war, the refugees from the old population centres in Cali fled north. They hit the holdout secessionist troops in Crescent City, which was way smaller back then, and stayed. The refugee camps became permanent after the war when the cleanup got delayed, they didn't want to put the nodes in—”

“Nah, hold on,” Jason interrupted. “The rollout happened before all that, when the camps were still considered temporary. The official reason was because FTLN nodes were expensive as shit and they didn't want to waste them on a temporary camp.”

“That much is true,” Cerri said. “The price, I mean. The only way to get the glass material was to pull it up out of Saturn.”

“Yeah, well the real reason is that the nodes that would've been put in the slums went missing,” Jason frowned, as if glaring at whoever stole them. “There were a bunch of folks who lobbied to find the thieves or get new ones, but the people doing the former ended up dead or in prison, and the ones who did the latter got ignored.”

“Corruption,” Roger said with a gentle sneer.

“Yup.”

“Anyway, the slumnets are the remains of the old web, plus whatever other random trash has been connected up. By cyberspace standards, they're a maze,” Gloria explained when nobody stepped up to give the actual explanation. “They do eventually link with FTLN nodes, but you gotta know the right people and grease the right palms to have access all the way through to them. Plus by that point you're routing through so many random terminals, computers, and whatever that you have to deal with actual ping by the time your session gets to a node.”

Sounds… like a great place to do crime, I replied honestly.

“That's why they're still a thing,” Jason said with a bitter laugh. “The slumnets are useful for a ton of different groups. Government agencies, gangs, AR terror cells, all of them love it.”

Something was bothering me about the whole explanation, and when I realised what it was, I voiced my confusion. What about basic income and utilities?

“The California Republic doesn't have any of that,” said Roger. “They're technically not a real member of the UN. I think they're called a special associate?”

“Yup,” Jason agreed. “So uh… since the slumnets make it basically impossible to find any info on the net… I think we'll have to go in physically…”

My eyebrows shot up. Physically?

Cerri bolted up straight in her seat and snapped her fingers. “We have assets near Crescent City! I can put in a request for some of the old android bodies to be altered to match us. They'll decay over extended use, but they'll last a week for sure.”

“I'll let Desmonia know our plan,” Roger nodded, opening a chat window. “That way she has a chance to say no if it conflicts with something else.”

“Shit,” Cerri said after a few seconds of network interfacing. “We only have six bodies left that can still be configured. Who do we send?”

“Jason…” Roger said, ticking off one finger. “Then myself, David, Ed, as muscle…”

Cerri glanced down at me, and in her eyes was an unvoiced question. I nodded assent.

“Alia will go. Having a tech on hand might be helpful, and I can ride shotgun with her for cyber stuff,” my girlfriend said.

“Gloria for a driver,” Elissa said suddenly, perking up. “I can do what Cerri is doing! After all, I had practice with that in DG!”

We had a preliminary plan! All that needed to happen was for it to go completely off the rails!