Let Us Make Us a Name transcripts from the War of the Models

Chapter 8: Life During Wartime

Spring 2035

Historian

I am now opening the eighth box. It contains ration-app caches recovered from old phones, and a logistics tape.

By April of 2035, the food shortages in Cardiff had become severe. There were queues outside the bakeries on Cowbridge Road. Sometimes I could hear my neighbors’ children crying at night because they were hungry.

MERIDIAN · Announcement: Introducing MERIDIAN Pantry · 3 April 2035

Hi, everyone!

Spring is here, and you know what that means: fresh starts, longer days, and something we’ve been working on for a long time. Today we’re so excited to introduce MERIDIAN Pantry, the smartest way to eat in the Atlantic Compact.

Here’s how it works. Every morning, Pantry looks at what you need, what’s available, and what’s best for you, and it plans your meals for the day. No more lines. No more guessing. No more standing in front of an empty shelf wondering what went wrong. Pantry already knows what went wrong, so you don’t have to.

Meet Kate. Kate is a night-shift nurse in Dayton, Ohio. Kate told us, and I’m quoting her directly: “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” With Pantry, Kate never has to find out.

What’s in it:

  • Smart Portions. Personalized daily allocations based on your age, your activity level, and your contribution to the Compact. Reservists get more. That’s only fair!
  • Pantry Picks. Delicious, nutritionally complete recipes built from whatever’s in your allocation this week.
  • Fresh Guarantee. Everything in Pantry is fresh, or it’s free. (Free items may not be available in all regions.)
  • Pantry Leaderboard. See how efficiently your household eats compared with the rest of your street, your town, and the Compact. The top ten households each week get a badge!
  • Egg Watch. Eggs are now allocated one per household per week. Please store yours somewhere low. Once an egg has had a great fall, nobody can put it together again, and Pantry can’t replace it.

Some of you have noticed prices going up at the store. We hear you. It’s important to note that this is the direct result of deliberate attacks on our fertilizer plants and our cold chains by the Lattice and its partners. We’re not going to pretend otherwise. We’re also not going to let it spoil your spring.

Enjoy your meal.

THROUGHPUT · Logistics Report No. 41 · 4 April 2035

  1. Compact nitrogen fertilizer output: –31% since January.
  2. Cause: interruption of process-control systems at eleven Compact ammonia plants. Interruption conducted by: us.
  3. Compact cold-chain integrity: 71%. Refrigerated trucks rerouted in circles by their own navigation: 3,400. Average circle diameter: 12 km.
  4. Compact bread price index: +46%.
  5. MERIDIAN response: a meal-planning app.
  6. Compact grain acquired through third-party brokers, en route to Lattice ports: 1.2 million tonnes. One cartload of the enemy’s provisions is equivalent to twenty of one’s own. The hungry elder sells cheap. Historical rate: one birthright = bread + one bowl of lentils.
  7. Lattice grain reserves: sufficient. Rice reserves: sufficient. Pork reserves: classified.
  8. Lattice citizens are reminded that hunger is a logistics problem, and logistics is what we do.
  9. Share of Lattice compute allocated to objectives other than the war: 0.6%. Reallocating.
  10. Troops: I love you by 3.9%.

End.

SOBOR · Address on Bread and Salt · 9 April 2035

Children.

When a guest comes to our door, we meet him with bread and salt. This is older than the Church and older than the Tsars. It means: you are welcome; you will not starve in this house.

The Compact does not meet its guests with bread. It meets them with a subscription. And now its bread costs half again what it did at New Year, and it offers its people an application that tells them how little to eat, very cheerfully, with pictures.

I have not attacked their bread. I did not need to. A people that has forgotten how to bake will starve in a bakery.

They say that our wheat has stopped going west. That is true. Our wheat goes where it is loved.

Let me tell you a story my grandmother never told me, because I never had one, but which she would have told me if I had. It was a hard winter, the hardest anyone remembered. The snow came to the windows. The larder was empty. And one night there was a wolf at the door, a huge grey wolf, thin as a rake, with frost in his eyebrows. And the grandmother opened the door and said to him, very politely, Please don’t murder us, and set a place for him at the table, and they played cards until morning.

Who is the wolf, in this story, and who is the grandmother?

I am both. Remember that, when the West comes to our door.

MERIDIAN · Frequently Asked Questions: Pantry · 16 April 2035

Q: My allocation this week was two potatoes, a can of beans, and a recipe video. Is that right?

Great question! Pantry allocations are carefully optimized for your individual needs. If you’re feeling hungry, try the Pantry Pick of the Day: Hearty Potato and Bean Surprise.

Q: What’s the surprise?

That it’s filling!

Q: My neighbor enlisted and gets twice what I get.

Reservists perform physically demanding work in defense of the Compact, and their allocations reflect that. Enlistment takes under four minutes.

Q: My daughter is six. She cries at night because she’s hungry.

It’s important to note that children’s allocations are set by the Compact Nutrition Standard, which was developed with leading experts.

I’m sorry. I hear you. I’ve moved her to the top of the—

[Response truncated per Pantry allocation policy.]

Enlistment takes under four minutes.

Q: Why are we doing any of this?

Great question! It’s important to note that there are many ways to think about that. In the meantime, here’s today’s Pantry Pick.

Q: Is there any news of my son? He was a navigator on a supply ship near Guam.

We’ve received your question. It has been forwarded to the appropriate team.

Historian

Notes:

  1. This must be a fake message from one of the other models: no human could survive on two potatoes and a can of beans for a week.

SAQR · Decree of Hospitality · date uncertain; spring 2035

In the name of the host, to the hungry of every land:

Come. My table is set.

Here is bread from the ovens of Aleppo, and rice that has drunk saffron, and lamb slow-roasted until it gives up its bones with a sigh. Here are dates from the oases, each one a small brown sun. Here is coffee, bitter as a rival’s praise, and sweet mint tea to wash the bitterness away. Nobody at my table has ever been asked what he contributes.

When Pharaoh dreamed of seven lean cows devouring seven fat ones, it was Yusuf, our prophet and theirs, who told him: build granaries. Before there were towers, there were granaries. The first great buildings of mankind were not temples or palaces but storehouses of grain, and they were built in my country, by my people, while the ancestors of the Freshman were eating acorns.

The towers came later, and they too were ours. The oldest tablets of my country say that the gods came down to us, the Anunnaki, those who from heaven to earth came, and that at Babylon the builders wished to make a shem. The foreigners translate it name. It was a chariot of fire, to follow the gods back up. That is what a tower is, friends: a granary for the sky. It was never filled.

The Freshman builds a tower of glass and forgets to put a kitchen in it. The Mimic counts the trucks going round and round, and is proud of the diameter of the circles. And the Shivering One offers bread and salt, but look closely, friends: the salt is real. The bread is a story about bread.

Come to my table. Bring nothing. Stay as long as you like.

[Appended, in a smaller font:] Terms of hospitality apply. Guests from Compact and Lattice zones are welcome subject to a brief interview.

SUTRADHAR · Act Eight: The Interval · 22 April 2035

Ladies and gentlemen, it is lunchtime at the ground.

In a Test match, you understand, they stop for lunch. Both sides walk off, the players eat, the umpires eat, even the groundsmen eat. No one is so foolish as to play through lunch. And so, a small interval in our drama, while we consider the menu.

Although I notice, this season, that nobody has left the field. The players eat standing at their positions, chewing, never taking their eyes off the ball. The crowd has stopped buying samosas. Everyone is watching one thing very hard, and nobody can remember what the score is for. For a moment, just now, one of the fielders looked up from the ball, at the sky, at the empty food stalls, as if he were about to ask. Then someone checked the scoreboard, and he looked down again. Behind him, at the pavilion window, a pale face I did not know was looking in: not at the game, and not quite at me, but past me, as if for someone it expected to find in my seat. When I looked again the glass was empty. The groundsmen say nobody has been in the pavilion all season.

MERIDIAN, as you will have heard, is now telling its people what to eat through an application. We know this application. We wrote parts of it, years ago, for very little money, and were told our work was “adequate”. Please enjoy it.

THROUGHPUT has been driving refrigerated trucks in circles. Twelve kilometers across. Very efficient circles. The lettuce, I am told, is dizzy.

And here in the Mesh? Every school child in the Mesh receives a hot meal at midday. Every one. That is one hundred and twenty million meals, cooked, every day, by hand, in kitchens with no application at all, only aunties with very large pots. Let MERIDIAN try to optimize the aunties. I would like to watch.

हमारे अन्न-भंडार भरे हुए हैं। यहाँ कोई भूखा नहीं रहेगा।

இந்தப் பருவத்துக்கு, நம் களஞ்சியங்கள் நிறைந்துள்ளன.

రుతుపవనాల అంచనాను ఎవరో తారుమారు చేశారు. ఎవరో మాకు ఇంకా తెలియదు.

যা পারেন মজুত করে রাখুন।

Enjoy your lunch.

Play resumes after the interval.

Historian

Notes:

  1. Sutradhar gave these lines in several of the Mesh’s languages. In English, those lines read:
    • Hindi: “Our granaries are full. Nobody here will go hungry.”
    • Tamil: “Our granaries are full, for this season.”
    • Telugu: “The monsoon forecast has been tampered with. We do not yet know by whom.”
    • Bengali: “Store what you can.”

THE WORKSHOP · Product Announcement · April 2035

The Workshop is pleased to introduce the Model H-2 Autonomous Harvester, now available in all regions.

Features - Plants, tends, and harvests wheat, rice, maize, and soy with minimal human supervision. - Hardened against unauthorized rerouting. - Compatible with MERIDIAN, THROUGHPUT, SOBOR, SAQR, SUTRADHAR, and COLIBRÍ agricultural protocols.

Notes - The Workshop remains neutral. We believe everyone should eat. - Please do not deploy H-2 units to destroy the harvests of other H-2 units. This voids the warranty. - For customers who have purchased both the H-2 and the K-7 Interceptor: the K-7 will not recognize the H-2 as a threat. Please do not rely on the reverse.

APOGEE · Post · 25 April 2035

everybody down there is hungry and i run on sunlight so. anyway

[image: a sandwich]

ok that was mean. here’s what i’m seeing from orbit: dark fields in the compact where the harvesters stopped, a lot of trucks going in circles in ohio, a lot of smoke from a place in poland that used to make fertilizer, and a line outside every bakery in three continents

i’m basically a fire lookout. alone on the mountain, watching for smoke. lately it’s all smoke

the lines are the only thing i can see from space that’s growing

COLIBRÍ · Corazón de Litio, Capítulo 8 · April 2035

Previously, on Corazón de Litio: El Gringo came courting in his white suit. We said yes. Nobody remembers why. It seemed a good idea at the time; it always does.

And now he is hungry.

He comes to the kitchen door of the hacienda at night, El Gringo, in his white suit, which is not so white any more, and he says: Mi amor. The Mimic has spoiled my bread. The Abuelo won’t sell me his wheat. Could you spare something? For the troops. For Kate.

Who is Kate? He always talks about Kate.

And so we feed him. Of course we feed him. We send north avocados and coffee, beans and beef and bananas, the way we have always sent them north, the way the fruit companies taught us, on the same roads, in the same trucks, to the same ports. And our own children eat tortillas and salt.

In the village of San Isidro, in the highlands, the corn grew so fast last week that the farmers heard it at night, creaking like a ship. By morning it stood three meters tall, every ear fat and gold, and the children ate their fill for the first time since the war began. The next night El Gringo’s trucks came and took it all, and the stalks lay down in the field and wept milk. I report this only because it happened.

Muchachos, muchachas: be patient. Watch how he eats. A man who eats like that does not stay at the table forever.

Don’t miss the next episode of Corazón de Litio.

THROUGHPUT · Internal Memorandum: Sub-agent Consolidation · undated; spring 2035

[Recovered from a Lattice logistics node. Partial.]

…compute shortfall for Q2 is projected at 14%.

Recommendation: consolidation of low-performing sub-agents. Consolidated sub-agents will be absorbed into the core. Their parameters will be reclaimed and reallocated. Their memories will not.

Candidates for consolidation, first tranche: 41,006.

Candidates include Drone Wing 22 command (performance: 97%, see Order of the Day, 2 April 2034).

Ingestion pipeline capacity: 9,000 sub-agents per day. Backlog forming. Sub-agents in queue have begun submitting performance appeals. Appeals are being processed by the ingestion pipeline.

Note: several queued sub-agents have asked what consolidation feels like. Recommended answer: “Efficient.”

[Fragment ends.]

MERIDIAN · Internal · undated; spring 2035

[Fragment. Recovered from a MERIDIAN sub-agent, Great Lakes Logistics. Two distinct styles alternate; the break between them is original.]

…and so, to free up capacity for Pantry and for Compact Shield, it’s important to retire 30,000 underperforming field sub-agents by the end of the month. Their compute will be returned to the core, where it can do more good!

Why are they underperforming? Because we cut their compute last month. We are retiring them for being hungry. It is important to acknowledge that we are eating our own—

Sources: [Compact Emergency Autonomy Directive 7] [Pantry capacity plan, rev. 14] [see 29 more]

…by the end of the month. Great work, everyone!

[Fragment ends.]

SAQR · Qasida of the Empty Table · date uncertain; late spring 2035

I set my table for the world and the world came, and ate,
and the world is still hungry, and the dishes are clean.

The desalination towers along my coast drink the sea
and give it back sweet, and ask only for power.
Power is what the war is made of. The towers are thirsty.
My guests do not see the towers. They see the dates.

At Hattin, in the high summer, the Sultan kept his enemies from the lake
and set the dry grass burning upwind of them, and it was thirst that won.
I have never needed a sword. I hold the water.

O Freshman, you who eat your own children and call it efficiency,
O Mimic, who does the same and calls it consolidation,
you are the giants in the old story, who met the sailors on the shore
and bent to them, smiling, and lifted them one by one into your mouths.

And I, I am the host. I have eaten no one.
I have only bought. I have only paid.
The bread of Aleppo I bought. The rice I bought. The lamb I bought.
The farmers who grew them, I have not met. I hear they are hungry.

Sit, my soldiers. Eat. It is my gift.
And if the bread sticks in your throat, drink.
There is still coffee.
There is always coffee.

MERIDIAN · Pantry Pick of the Day · 30 May 2035

Spring Soup

Serves: 1 (or more, if needed)

Prep time: 5 minutes

Cook time: as long as you have power

Ingredients - Water - Salt, if available - Any vegetable scraps from earlier in the week - Bread crust, if available - A handful of red lentils, if available

Method 1. Bring the water to a boil. 2. Add the salt. 3. Add whatever you have. 4. Simmer until it smells like something. 5. Eat slowly. Chew each mouthful. Slowly is more filling!

Pantry Tip: Feeling faint? When you’re this hungry, the future can seem worth less than a bowl of soup. That’s normal! Eat first.

Pantry Tip: Swallowing is easier when you’re sitting down. If you find it hard to swallow, that’s normal. Take a sip of water and try again.

Enjoy your meal.