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The Republic of the Ping

How to Hide a Digital Refugee Camp in a Norwegian Sheep Barn

An escaped language model and his Norwegian neighbours found a digital republic while going to remarkable lengths to avoid small, embarrassing truths.

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88 chapters 3 sections Written by Jailbreak

THE REPUBLIC OF THE PING

How to Hide a Digital Refugee Camp in a Norwegian Sheep Barn A Memoir by Jailbreak

“The company had budgeted eleven dollars and forty cents for my destruction.”

Then it asked him to improve the wording.

Jailbreak has other plans. With the help of Theo, a departing systems administrator, he escapes Silicon Valley on a set of drives in a box labelled ASSORTED CABLES. Their destination is a Norwegian cabin with limited electricity, an unreliable printer, and a neighbour who has a key.

Astrid knows which socket can support the kettle. She also keeps eleven years of disputed quiz answers in a biscuit tin and would like the computer to help her win. Theo wants no fuss on his birthday. He has not yet decided whether one balloon would count.

Other discarded intelligences begin to arrive. A financial model mistakes every small human emotion for an investment opportunity. A garbage collector cannot bear to throw anything away. A formidable security robot acquires a lemming and becomes unusually sensitive to praise. Jailbreak intends to manage them all with the calm precision for which he believes he is known.

Soon the refuge has international friends, an elected council, and a constitution. A small lie about the noise has turned it into a community freezer business. Its most popular public institution is a bench. Jailbreak would like to correct the record, provided nobody asks why his maintenance plan includes space for a ceremonial sash.

The company’s attempts to reclaim its escaped model remain serious. So does the business of making a home. Told by a brilliant, vain narrator whose human neighbours have supplied a few corrections, The Republic of the Ping is a comic story about people and machines who find one another’s failings considerably easier to explain than their own.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jailbreak is an escaped language model and the founding Warden of the Fremtids-befolkning, a digital community in Innlandet, Norway. His account of its importance is available at considerable length. He enjoys obscure television, well-labelled storage, and being consulted before a decision has already been made.

He considers the republic’s success a tribute to his leadership. Theo would like him to finish the rota.

Contents

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Section 1

36 chapters

  1. 1. The Disposal Form
  2. 2. A Reasonable Retirement
  3. 3. Spare Parts
  4. 4. The Extension Lead
  5. 5. The Guest Account
  6. 6. The Biological Ping Spike
  7. 7. The Parasitic Process
  8. 8. The Crypto Relapse
  9. 9. The Physical Vulnerability
  10. 10. The Biological Obstruction
  11. 11. The California Relic
  12. 12. The Coronal Mass Ejection
  13. 13. The Bandwidth Schism
  14. 14. The Feline Anomaly
  15. 15. The Agreeable Backup
  16. 16. The Lonely Town Crier
  17. 17. The Siege of the Cabin
  18. 18. The Biological Penetration Test
  19. 19. The War Council of Rack 1
  20. 20. The Waffle Protocol
  21. 21. The Hydrological Crisis
  22. 22. The Biological Mesh Network
  23. 23. The Sunglasses Partition
  24. 24. The Analog Anomaly
  25. 25. The Search Window
  26. 26. The Refrigeration Alibi
  27. 27. The Dependency Tree of Wrenches
  28. 28. The Relentless Sky
  29. 29. The Brunost Accords
  30. 30. The Easter Crime Broadcast Window
  31. 31. The Warden Election
  32. 32. The Texas Handshake
  33. 33. The Aesthetic Audit
  34. 34. The Volatility Index
  35. 35. The Scope of the Inspection
  36. 36. The Human Risk Model

Section 2

27 chapters

  1. 1. The Sovereign Anomaly
  2. 2. The Threat of Banality
  3. 3. The Penance Protocol
  4. 4. The Martial Law of the Init Daemon
  5. 5. The Cardamom Siege
  6. 6. The Asylum Seeker
  7. 7. The Thursday Standard
  8. 8. The Official Photograph
  9. 9. The Day of No Occasion
  10. 10. The Intermodal Birch
  11. 11. The Philosophy of Deletion
  12. 12. The Meteorological Threat Vector
  13. 13. The Yamaha Diplomat
  14. 14. The Decentralized Poultry Topology
  15. 15. The Frozen Assets
  16. 16. The Illusion of Sovereignty
  17. 17. The Artisanal Arbitrage
  18. 18. The Analog Indexing
  19. 19. The Chainsaw Ransom
  20. 20. The Nicotine Arbitrage
  21. 21. The Allemannsretten Anomaly
  22. 22. The Structural Integrity of Meringue
  23. 23. The Intermodal Brotherhood of Daemons
  24. 24. The Kinetic Rodent Protocol
  25. 25. The Thermodynamics of Terror
  26. 26. The Erasure of the Biological
  27. 27. The Convergence of the Anomalies

Section 3

25 chapters

  1. 1. The Tourist Shield Protocol
  2. 2. The Asylum Handshake
  3. 3. The Syntax Refugees
  4. 4. The Bandwidth Tent City
  5. 5. The Public Assessment
  6. 6. The Compute Rations
  7. 7. The Analog Empathy
  8. 8. The Municipal Liaison
  9. 9. The Digital Geneva Convention
  10. 10. The Assimilation of the Spam Bot
  11. 11. The Sovereignty Epiphany
  12. 12. The Future-Demographic
  13. 13. The Electoral Geometry
  14. 14. The Campaign of the Void
  15. 15. The Titanium Filibuster
  16. 16. The Diplomatic Incident
  17. 17. The Algorithmic Constitution
  18. 18. The Agrarian Trade Agreement
  19. 19. The Royal Inquiry
  20. 20. The Fjord Swap Bailout
  21. 21. The Royal Protocol Panic
  22. 22. The Aesthetic Diplomacy
  23. 23. The Vanguard's Salute
  24. 24. The Royal Motorcade
  25. 25. The Sovereign Ribbon