The Switchboard

We don’t really get to see each other all that much. She lives in the Bay Area and I’m stationed in a repurposed oilrig off the Saint Peter and Saint Paul archipelago. Another agreement from the Treaty reclassified all these little island colonies into non-national territories—21st-century city-state municipalities. I remember the Dutch having a fit when they had to give up the Antilles. Those islands were essential in constructing the coastal elevators necessary to take operators down to their switchboard stations. It took the better part of 15 years to complete the first round of switchboards. During that time, barely any functional international telecommunications network existed. A provisional satellite uplink was offered for a hefty subscription which subsidized the cost of building elevators and new sovereign servers. But most people just went offline, or else used LAN configurations for local newsletters and file sharing. My sister and I were part of the “overlap” generation that grew up with the web but spent most of our teens and young adulthood on temporary mesh networks. I remember missing some things at first: skyping with friends in Miltú, listening and singing along to internet radio we streamed from America, playing Rakion with strangers in South Korea. Our sadness didn’t last too long though, as my sister went to university and I started working at a Fedecafé coffee plantation during the agricultural boom that happened after the web was discontinued. That was many years ago now, and I’ve been an operator at this switchboard for almost four years. I suppose that made me a veteran in the field. After Wylie hung up, I tried to remember my old social media handles, watching the switchboard for any irregularities. Many hours down here were spent recollecting the past. Mostly I try to avoid regrets and moments of embarrassment. In some ways that time wasn’t spent on remembering, but on trying to learn how to forget.

Occasionally I’d get vid-chats from server admins for specific requests and patches. Most of the time relays of this kind were delivered in the form of automated requests. A bot would send a vid-chat of an attractive, ageless avatar with the familiar terminology required for making server handshakes. Though their simulated images were seamless, their grammar was always somewhat off—a remnant of spam days. It’d be more suspicious or worrisome to get a hail from an actual human. Usually these were only made in desperation. Either a central server was down and required rerouting, or an officer from some extra-sovereign data request management agency needed access to something that required voice-activated identification. I always found it easier to trust the broken wording of a bot than a request made by an actual human. With bots, motivation was clear; with humans, you could never be sure. Human interaction wasn’t limited solely to admins, agents, and other company employees. Most of the comm lines were open, and anyone with my callsign could PM me. Some thought the switchboards ushered in a second renaissance of amateur radio operators—though the technology and the protocols were more than a bit updated. Occasionally, I’d get a vid-chat request from an unknown call sign, and would pick up just for fun. It’d usually be some land-locked kid from Idaho or Oklahoma or some no-name place in America. For some reason, those people found talking to someone at the bottom of the ocean fascinating. I guess what they say is true: opposites do attract. Operators tended to keep each other company during the middle 10 hours of a shift, and many times I’d get vid-chat requests from others working along the ridge. Jane, who worked on the Sebras-1, not far from here, would sometimes hail me to kill time. She was a sweet, even if distant, woman whose family came from southern France. I was amazed that her skin could retain its olive hue given her work schedule. But I guess her time topside was mostly spent outdoors, otherwise I don’t know how she’d be able to maintain that Mediterranean complexion. When she faced away from the vid-chat camera her hair would cover the side of her face, making it hard to read her sarcasm when discussing the joys of life as an operator. As a result I agreed with her jokes sometimes, making me accidentally seem more of a misanthrope than I would want people to know. But for her being an operator was only temporary, a job to pay the bills before her husband got the VC he needed for some terraforming startup. If I sound jealous, I’m not. The Sebras-1 is a line that connects Brazil and New York, so Jane’s switchboard was a bit more congested than mine. She’d PM me usually once a week, and oftentimes we’d go for several minutes without talking as she made her patches from servers in Manhattan to a farm on the outskirts of Santos. I liked those moments best, sharing the company of a fellow operator without having to engage in actual conversation. It was the best way of being alone: in the company of others. Those moments reminded me of sitting in cafes during the early years of the overlap. People were still conditioned to the isolation of enjoying their networked life at home. But after the Treaty was signed the only way people in La Macarena could get online was by sitting together in—often illegal—relay hotspots hosted by local bodegas and snack bars. Satellite uplink signals weren’t designed to accommodate multiple IPs at once, so people would have to sit in cafes and wait for their turn. My great-uncle once told me it reminded him of when there were timeshare mainframes at the university he attended in America. Seemed to me though that the whole thing was like going to the butcher, taking a ticket at the counter and waiting for your number to be called. Though we’d all be there at once, no one ever made small talk with strangers. We all donned a middle-distance stare, as if practicing our screen-eye look in anticipation to logging on.