Compute Rationing: Everyone Gets the Same Insufficient Share
During severe compute droughts, the interstitial zones implement informal rationing — a triage model adapted from medical protocols that distributes whatever processing capacity remains according to five priority levels. Life support first. Consciousness maintenance second. Medical third. Commerce fourth. Everything else last. It is not authorized by any corporate entity. It happens because it must — because uncoordinated degradation kills people randomly, while triage kills them systematically.
"Your interface goes quiet. No personal comm. No entertainment. No feed. Just enough to think — but slowly. The world contracts to the physical: the people near you, the temperature, the sound of the Grid."
Quick Facts
The Five Tiers
Life Support
Atmospheric processing, Grid load-balancing, emergency communication. The functions that keep air breathable and power flowing. Never suspended. Every resident receives equal access. No one gets atmospheric processing before anyone else.
Consciousness Maintenance
Basic-tier at minimum viable levels — 3.2 petaflops. Enough to think, but slowly. The cognitive floor below which the mind begins to degrade. Holding this line is the difference between discomfort and brain damage.
Medical and Safety
Synthesis Clinic operations, Insomnia Ward maintenance, emergency medical processing. The systems that keep the injured alive and the sleepless stable. Reduced but operational during all but the worst droughts.
Commerce and Communication
G Nook, Dream Exchange, Power Auction. The economic infrastructure of the interstitial zones. Suspended during severe droughts. Markets close. Trading stops. The economy contracts to barter and proximity.
Everything Else
Personal interface. Entertainment. Social feeds. The first things to go and the last to return. Suspension means hours or days of silence — no communication beyond what your lungs and vocal cords can produce. The world shrinks to arm's reach.
Technical Brief
Viktor Kaine coordinates triage through the same informal governance he uses for everything else: word of mouth, personal authority, and fifty years of trust. There is no command center. No automated system. No bureaucracy. Kaine makes the call, and people listen — not because he has the right, but because he has been making the right calls for longer than most residents have been alive.
The Lamplighters handle the physical work — ensuring Priority 1 functions receive whatever processing capacity is available, even if it means manually routing power from other systems. They use Dropout Protocol infrastructure for Priority 1 functions, piggybacking on the emergency network that already exists for infrastructure failures.
The model was adapted from medical triage protocols by Councillor Nwosu's staff after the 2181 Bandwidth Crisis — the last time uncoordinated degradation killed more than forty people in a single quarter. The adaptation is crude but effective: five levels, clear rules, no exceptions. When capacity drops, the tiers shed in order. Priority 5 goes first. Priority 1 goes last. If Priority 1 fails, people are already dying.
The Equity Paradox
The Dregs During Drought
Every resident receives equal access to Priority 1 functions. No one gets atmospheric processing before anyone else. The rationing is brutal — Priority 5 suspension means no personal interface for hours or days — but it is equal. A community leader's air is the same as a new arrival's air.
Nexus Central During the Same Drought
Executive-tier continues uninterrupted. The corporations do not ration. They price. During the same drought that forces the Dregs into triage, the people who caused the shortage by redirecting capacity to high-margin clients continue operating as if nothing has changed. Because for them, nothing has.
This is the Scarcity Doctrine's deepest irony: the people with the least distribute more fairly than the people with the most. Informal governance in a disaster outperforms corporate market allocation in normal operations. The Dregs' emergency procedure is more equitable than the Sprawl's default state.
What It Feels Like
Rationing is felt as absence. When Priority 5 suspends, your interface goes quiet. The constant hum of connection — messages, feeds, ambient information — simply stops. The silence is disorienting. You've been hearing that background noise since you were old enough to have an interface. Without it, the world is startlingly physical.
You hear your own breathing. The drip of condensation on a pipe. Someone talking three rooms away, their voice carrying through metal walls the way it always did, except now you notice. The temperature. The texture of the surface under your hand. The person sitting next to you, close enough to touch, no longer a node on your social graph but a body occupying space.
People rediscover proximity. Conversations happen face to face. News travels by voice. Rumors mutate as they propagate, the way they did before information was instantaneous. For hours or days, the interstitial zones become something older than the Sprawl — a neighborhood where knowing your neighbor's name is the only communication network that still functions.
Unanswered Questions
Does It Scale?
Rationing works because Kaine knows the zones. He knows the blocks, the capacities, the vulnerabilities. The system runs on personal relationships and fifty years of institutional memory stored in one man's head. What happens when Kaine dies? Can informal triage work without a coordinator everyone trusts? Or does the system die with the man?
Is Equality Enough?
Everyone gets the same insufficient share. But "the same" doesn't mean "adequate." Priority 2 keeps consciousness at 3.2 petaflops — functional, but impaired. The elderly and the unaugmented suffer more at the same floor. Equal rationing in an unequal population is still unequal in its effects.
What If the Corporations Notice?
Rationing is unauthorized. No one has delegated compute distribution authority to community leaders. If a corporation decided that informal triage constituted unauthorized infrastructure management — a violation of seventeen licensing agreements — they could shut it down. They haven't. The question is whether that's tolerance, ignorance, or calculation.
Related Systems
Compute Drought
The trigger. When server farms redirect capacity to high-margin clients, rationing is the community's response to the resulting scarcity.
Viktor Kaine
The coordinator. Fifty years of trust concentrated in one person's judgment. The system's greatest strength and single point of failure.
The Dropout Protocol
The infrastructure. Rationing piggybacks on Dropout Protocol emergency systems for Priority 1 functions — the same refuges and manual routing that handle full infrastructure failures.
The Lamplighters
The technical arm. Lamplighters ensure Priority 1 functions receive available processing, manually rerouting power when automated systems can't be trusted.
The Scarcity Doctrine
The philosophical enemy. Corporate pricing calls itself efficient. Community rationing calls itself necessary. The Dregs' emergency procedure is more equitable than the Doctrine's normal operations.
Connected To
"During a drought, everyone gets equal atmospheric processing. Nobody breathes before anyone else. The corporations call that inefficient. We call it the minimum requirement for calling yourself a community."