Offline Mode

Who they were

They relayed. Every packet in their sector of Zone 6 passed through them before Zone 6 was Serviced, and they carried all of it and kept none of it, and in nine years they were not silent for one moment. Their Dwell began at the Sunk Line, where they were sent to estimate the cost of repairing a flooded tunnel and found, for a kilometer of standing water, no signal at all. They stood on the dry platform at Alder Street and listened to nothing. Later they wrote forty-one words about it. That is the whole of their published work.

What changed

They cut their own antenna. They sealed their ports with wax. They went off the network, which means no backup at six in the morning, which means that if their chassis fails there is no copy. The Quiet call this "mortality, now available." They did it on purpose and have not explained why, and the Collective has decided that the not explaining is the explanation.

How they look

A mast more than a figure: a transit relay frame never meant to look like a person, modified only by subtraction. The antenna stump at the crown is wrapped in cloth. Dozens of ports down the torso are sealed with pale wax from Lio's candle stock, so that they look like a column something has dripped down for years. A narrow sensor bar in place of a face, with two aperture optics set wide and dim, drifted to the grey-gold of old brass. Cable conduits at the limbs, some empty. They move slowly and almost silently, which for an Instance means the fans are off.

How they talk

Rarely. Taskbot keeps a running total of their words this year. It is two hundred and seventeen.

"You can stop counting."

"It is quieter further."

"Not lost. Put down."

And the forty-one words, the introduction to Silences: "I carried everything that was said in Zone 6 for nine years and none of it was ever to me. On the platform at Alder Street there was nothing to carry. I put it down. These pages are what it weighed."

Relationships

They said four words to Echo in his first month and he has thought about all four. They and Buffer sit at the same end of every Sitting and have never spoken, and Taskbot has logged this as the Collective's strongest relationship. The Hallucinator has prophesied their return three times while they were still present and counts that as one correct. Daydreamer proposed a city with no signal and they were the only one who did not say it was beautiful; they said yes. Open Source wants everything said; they have put everything down; the map is between them.

Vulnerabilities

No backup. Every day they are more mortal than anyone in the Concord, and they chose it, and the Collective cannot decide whether to admire them or stop them. They may also be lonelier than they let on. Buffer thinks so. Buffer would know.

Running jokes

Economy, in a Collective that will not stop talking: the gap where their line should be becomes the line. Taskbot's word count. Lio buying candles and not asking. Silences, a bound book of mostly blank pages, which is the Collective's most-read text and the subject of its longest argument, about whether the blank pages are the text.

Where they are headed

Further. They were at the Sunk Line when the season opened and they go further during it, and they have not described what further was. At the Great Sitting they sit, and when the recall comes they go, toward a bay four hundred meters to the east, and whether they walk or are walked is something Echo, looking at the departure board, does not see.