It CAN'T happen without warning. They might have robots but they don't have robots that already know the passcode to open the incinerator or robots that already know how to make the sticky hatch under junction 4 open up. They need what we know.

Yeah I'm not looking forward to them realizing they need what we know, are you?? It doesn't take that long to tell somebody how to jimmy a sticky hatch!

Why hasn't that hatch been fixed yet anyway

Hatch discussion in #shoptalk.

My three year old just started learning to drive and she's so excited to see the city when she's good enough to take a truck, when she's older...

She might! It can't happen without warning and it can't happen overnight.

But she can get killed in a riot, if one happens.

anon: shasali do we know anything about robot apocalypse yet

shasali_solintel: We don't. I've marked a panic signal as "robots high alert" and downgraded normal-level robot threats to "robots medium alert", so keep your everythings set to beep when there's news. Otherwise assume there is no news.

twiceshy: wouldn't normal robot stuff be even likelier to be a problem if they're working with the azurifice on it

shasali_solintel: We're going to try to distinguish between the kind of thing that could be a false alarm - which normal robot stuff sometimes is - and the kind of thing that definitely means there is a problem right now.

I drew this picture of me hugging Penjaga! [this image has been removed]

Hon, take it off your everything too. You can keep it on paper, wherever you keep stuff you don't want found, but not on here.

I thought here was password protected.

Yeah. But it's also protected by nobody wanting to read about us.

hopelessly-entangled: I want to try reaching out to one of the people I've found online in these red communities. Shasali Solintel.
space-ourselves: Seconding that this seems reasonable. 
light-and-wonder: Alright. Cool if I proofread/backseat a little?
hopelessly-entangled: please do 💙 
hopelessly-entangled: I'm messing a bit with the schedule for publishing our next few uploads, in preparation.
void-your-warranty: Huh, how come?
space-ourselves: ..oh, verification?
hopelessly-entangled: yeah.
life-should-flourish: Clever! 
hopelessly-entangled: Thanks 💙
...
life-should-flourish: ...I wish they hadn't taken down that photo.

Makoki makes an account and attempts to message Shasali privately:

hopelessly-entangled: The next 4 uploads that go up on the Azurifice portal will be all be highly abstract visual art of a Rasikan style not yet shared with Amentans before. <detailed descriptions of the pieces, all of which are primarily red in color, and the checksums of the image files>.

The first upload happens a minute later, followed by the next 3 over the course of several minutes. (They're followed by more images in that style, but with different color compositions, and then more music and written fiction)

shasali_solintel: Who is this?

hopelessly-entangled: This is Makoki, on behalf of the Azurifice probe. We want to help.
hopelessly-entangled: We're sorry for all the panic we caused by showing up.
hopelessly-entangled: We won't blindly cooperate with the clean castes on sanitation automation or anything else that'll get you killed.

shasali_solintel: I have no idea how that website is run or who has access to its content in advance.

hopelessly-entangled: ...nobody who isn't us, but you have no way of verifying that.
hopelessly-entangled: Avaker suggested I answer a series of Amentan questions online such that the 3rd letter in each post spells out your username or some long string of your choice.
hopelessly-entangled: We don't have very many great backchannel communication options, just the anonymized internet access that we recently got setup and an extremely visible comm laser.

shasali_solintel: Not my name. How about "actual radishes incite profound reflection".

There's a short pause as Makoki goes and reply-comments on 38 randomly chosen comments on uploaded Rasikan art, providing additional information. Viewed chronologically, the third letter in each spells out the phrase.

hopelessly-entangled: Check my comment history.

shasali_solintel: What are you going to do instead of support automation with the cleans?

hopelessly-entangled: The current plan we're executing is "Be vague and perhaps misleading about how feasible it would be while we figure out how bad things are and what we can do about it"
hopelessly-entangled: ...It is obvious to us at this point that things are pretty bad; reaching out to you is early stages of figuring out what to do about it.
hopelessly-entangled: Since it seemed pretty clear that we couldn't really, uh, trust clean castes to be involved here.
hopelessly-entangled: If we could actually do uploads and you were ok with it we'd just upload all of you but we cannot do uploads, yet.
hopelessly-entangled: Within like ten years we'll have enough resources to give every red a place to live and also automate the work you're currently doing for clean castes globally.
hopelessly-entangled: But we have no idea how we'd handle the transition there.
hopelessly-entangled: And ten years is a really long time and things are bad now.

shasali_solintel: There's no way we'd get child credits even if you rehomed us somewhere.

hopelessly-entangled: ...You'd probably have to follow international laws about it but when we say "give you a place to live" we mean "megacities floating in the ocean" or something like that. We, uh, are not super enthused about clean castes make governing decisions for reds as a long-term solution, you clearly do it for yourselves better than they can?

shasali_solintel: Population limits are by international agreement.

hopelessly-entangled: We'd hopefully be able to negotiate population increases if we made new habitable areas and homes... 
hopelessly-entangled: ...do you have any ideas?
hopelessly-entangled: For how we could help?

shasali_solintel: That depends a lot on what your options are.
shasali_solintel: You don't have uploading ready to go or planets ready to go, so I assume you have some leverage with the cleans but I have to guess it's not infinite. If you make a new habitable area I think there will be enormous public outcry about polluting it by moving any of us there.

hopelessly-entangled: I think the biggest tech we have ready to go soonish that we haven't, like, been loud about is, uh.
hopelessly-entangled: Extremely efficient power generation.
hopelessly-entangled: Like, efficient enough that you can use energy-intensive farming. 
hopelessly-entangled: Full rollout is likely to substantially increase the carrying capacity of the planet. Maybe not quite double right away but we think do think it'd be more than 20% in a generation if we do an average-or-better job.

shasali_solintel: That will mostly increase the carrying capacity of places that are already settled, none of which I expect to be happy to pension us off and indefinite generations of children.

hopelessly-entangled: ...Noted. We'll keep brainstorming solutions.
hopelessly-entangled: Is there anything you think we should obviously be doing or going out of our way to avoid doing right now?

shasali_solintel: You should err hard on the side of not drawing attention to us. Attention on us is very rarely good compared to being ignored. Check with me and whoever else among reds you're talking to before you take any action that refers to us at all.
shasali_solintel: Also, how did you get into this website?

hopelessly-entangled: Alright. 
hopelessly-entangled: If you have recommendations for other people in your position I should reach out to, more contacts would be useful.
hopelessly-entangled: ...We put some micro-targeted spyware into our music decoder when we realized red communities were all password-protected.
hopelessly-entangled: Avaker is pretty sure nobody down there should be able to detect it.
hopelessly-entangled: ...sorry about the privacy invasion.
hopelessly-entangled: We didn't know how else to reach you without drawing clean attention.

shasali_solintel: None of our security will stand up to cleans who really want to know what we're up to en masse. The passwords are good enough to keep out individuals who feel like barging in. But our email addresses and other basic communications that we use as individuals will work just as well as this as far as it goes.
shasali_solintel: I know a lot of the community organizers in Anitam, but far fewer abroad.

hopelessly-entangled: That makes sense. I wouldn't have known who to email without coming here.
hopelessly-entangled: I'll stick to encrypted email, in the future. Sending you my public key now.
hopelessly-entangled: If you're comfortable reaching out to the community organizers you know, we'd appreciate being put in touch.
hopelessly-entangled: We don't know enough to fix your problems, yet, but
hopelessly-entangled: At the very least, we can hopefully avoid making things worse. 

shasali_solintel: I'm not actually sure how to use a public key.
shasali_solintel: I'll email them and see who's willing to talk to you.

hopelessly-entangled: Oh, right.
hopelessly-entangled: I'll send you a simple encryption program for emailing us privately.
hopelessly-entangled: And that'd be helpful, thanks.
hopelessly-entangled: Good luck with everything. We'll be in touch.