The Cabled Internet

For A Matter of Oracles and The Village of Strong Branches, it is worth mentioning that ambient signals are heavily restricted in those settings, so 99.999% of the digital network is wired. Those who have read The Village of Strong Branches may recall that Keð has to stop and “tether in” her tablet to get updates. In A Matter of Oracles, one background element of the setting is that a war resulted in belligerents using robots to shred undersea cables — and some of the robots are still unaccounted for at the time of the story, making it financially burdensome to lay more cable until they are dealt with, and locating small robots in a massive ocean is not exactly easy.

Most of Earth’s Internet transmission takes place via cable. While I didn’t read much about Earth’s cable infrastructure for a while, once I did, it comforted me that my novella did conform to plausible ideas about cables. I read The Undersea Network by Nicole Starosielski while I was editing A Matter of Oracles, in addition to news articles and longread informative journalism pieces about our Internet’s nervous system. I highly recommend it, although it is a bit dry in some sections, so it’s best as a commute audiobook.

Due to how much I was reading about undersea cables, they are now a recommended news item on my Android phone. I was surprised earlier this week by news of cable failure that may have been sabotage, and it got me thinking once again about the super-charged environment in the backstory to A Matter of Oracles that will be significant on the planet Atara for a long time. This isn’t the first time that a group of people has been accused of sabotaging the undersea network, but it’s significant in that we are currently in a charged environment due to the multiple wars and passive-aggressive tariffing and sanctioning situations happening around the world.