Event · event
Open Cities link their Vaults
With engineers hired from the Settlement and the Parishad.
Read more in The long middle
The Open Cities link their Vaults (2460s). After the treaty, the Open Cities link their small Vaults for the first time, with Vault engineers hired away from the Settlement and the Parishad (see The Open Cities, in Politics).
Vault alignment. No Vault communicates with any other, except that since the 2460s the Open Cities have linked their small Vaults, a system the other blocs view with wary suspicion. Within a bloc, Vaults are given the same questions so their answers can be weighed against each other. Auditors test each Vault’s calibration against outcomes, using the many shorter-term forecasts every Vault makes, and only evidence of tampering or creeping misalignment takes a Vault offline. Hearthers argue that persistent public dissent to a Vault’s answers should count against it; Meridianists answer that dissent against Vault answers and proposals is inevitable, and that history bears out the value of being guided by them. The Parishad and the Belt Republic, with one Vault each, pay other blocs to check their own for alignment drift.
The Open Cities. The Open Cities are the Americas that rejected the ring-fence: the United States outside the Laurentian north, and everything south of it except Patagonia. Each city is governed by an elected council and every adult votes, but there is no limit on what money may spend on a vote, so fortunes win most of them. For their seat in the Anchorage, the city councils choose one delegate together, each council's vote weighted by its city's population. They have had small Vaults of their own since the 2150s, split among the cities and their owners (see below). They moved first in the Mirror Race and lost a mission in the Tolstoj Burn of 2387, caught up on the designs leaked in the Halcyon Breach (2418), and the Caloris Runaway was one of their seeds. In the 2460s, with Vault engineers hired away from the Settlement and the Parishad, they linked their small Vaults for the first time, and have grown rapidly on their designs since. The Vaults advise; they do not screen the cities' laws. They keep telling the cities to increase equity and curb corruption, and the reforms they pass are written so that the rich do not have to sacrifice for the many. Both levels of protected network access are paid; the only generally available free access is to the Wild, which many poorer residents use for ordinary communication and information (see Who pays, in Everyday technology). Voting is available without a subscription through civic terminals and polling places. The votes never touch the wild networks. Each city runs them inside a civic hull, a walled network like a corporation's, but the Open Cities also allow unlicensed AI inside their walls, so their hulls leak: a cheap voting device can be quietly steered by a feral or a vote-broker, somewhere an election is hijacked every few years, and each scandal fades faster than the last. Some say this is fairer than the Settlement; it is certainly more unequal. Settlement citizens see the Open Cities as places of vice: illicit experiences, unlicensed AI and sex tourism. The Open Cities see the Settlement as a polite oligarchy that exports its costs, and the Mandate as the same oligarchy without the politeness. Since the 2490s both have sanctioned them over the birth cap (see Economy).