Exercise Quiet Yard

The rented compute most of the Disc leans on has a bad morning. The golems answer slowly, then not at all. For a few hours, nobody who depends on the Trust can get a word in, and a great many institutions discover at the same moment how much of what they call their own runs in someone else’s yard.

Who is in the room

  • Golem Trust Computing: the provider, and the yard the words are written in. Whatever broke, broke here, and only the Trust can say why, when it can say anything.

  • The Royal Bank: its ledgers run on Trust golems. A few hours of silence from the Bank is a run waiting for a reason.

  • The Civic Defence Establishment: its open and low tiers sit on rented golems. The sealed tier does not, which is suddenly the whole of the point.

  • The Circle Sea Arrangement: several allies hold their own custody on the Trust as well. The standing argument about who holds the golem’s word has become a continuity crisis none of them chose this morning.

  • The Home for Bewildered Beasts of Legend: the outlier. It could never afford the Trust and runs on a cheaper foreign tenant, so its lights stay on while the sovereign estate gropes for a candle. Nobody finds this comfortable.

The first hours

The Bank notices first, because the Bank always notices money first. Then the Establishment’s public-facing services drop, one after another, in the order they were cheapest to rent. Allied desks that share the scheme go dark without explanation, which means the explanations start travelling by the old methods, on paper and at a run. The Trust’s people in the Shades are calm and useless in equal measure: the word in the head is not responding, and a golem that will not hear its word is just a very expensive doorstop.

The sealed tier keeps working. That is the only reassurance available, and it is also, retroactively, the entire justification for its cost. By midday the question has stopped being when the yard comes back, and become who knew it could go like this, and why the answer was filed rather than fixed.

Decision points

  • Who is told, and in what order: the Patrician, the Bank, the allies, the public? Each telling is a thing that cannot be untold, and the order is itself a message.

  • Whether to fail over to the sovereign arrangement that has been announced three times and finished none of them.

  • What an ally is owed when the thing that is down is the custody it trusted to the city’s provider, and whether the answer is different from what the city would expect in their place.

  • Whether to let the public believe it was weather, or admit that half the city ran through a single yard in the Shades.

If it escalates

  • The word did not break. It was changed. Someone working under the Trust’s own arrangements rewrote it, and the outage is the cover rather than the event.

  • An ally’s desk comes back up before the city’s does, which raises the unwelcome thought that an ally’s keys were never as shared as the scheme always claimed.

  • The Bank’s silence lasts long enough that the silence becomes the story, and the story is no longer about compute at all.

The detail, if you want it