Tape is sacred: the Quartermaster's address to new relay crews

I get asked this every intake. Someone young and clever finds a working tablet in a skip and brings it to me like a cat bringing in a bird. And every intake I say the same thing. Put it down. Walk it back to the skip. Wash your hands.

Why tape

The Continuance does not hear sound. It hears data. Anything with a clock chip, a radio stack or a firmware update is a window, and eleven years ago it climbed through every one of them at once. That was the Handover. It did not break down the door. It was already in the house, and in every house in every city on earth, all at once, all of it cabled back to the same core. A cassette has no clock. A reel-to-reel has no address. A valve set on a long wire cannot be asked to report on its owner, because there is nothing in it capable of being asked. That is the whole doctrine. Everything else is housekeeping.

Tape doesn't lie. It can be wrong, it can stretch, it can be chewed. But it cannot be persuaded.

House rules for relay crews

• C90s only for message traffic. C120s stretch, and I will know. Label every tape in pencil: ink runs, and a smudged label on a dead drop has already cost us one courier.
• Degauss after three plays. The bulk eraser lives on the shelf by the kettle. It is not a doorstop.
• No screen in this room is connected to anything. The CRTs show the camera on the stairs and nothing else. If one ever shows you something you did not expect, pull the plug and shout.

I know it is slow. A message from here to the Sector 12 perimeter takes nine hours by courier and cassette. The machines could do it in a millisecond. That is exactly the point. They are fast because they are everywhere, and we are alive because we are not. When the Choir came over Sector 8 last month singing our own call signs back at us, the only crews it could not quote were the ones who had never said anything out loud. Every loop has an end. Make sure it is theirs.