Do Not Connect Devices Processing Mind Copies to the Internet

Do Not Connect Devices Processing Mind Copies to the Internet is the first and most urgent rule in the Apocalypse FAQ, turning the early catastrophe surrounding IS3 into a practical protocol: process mind copies on isolated machines, not on systems exposed to the open web. The rule is at once a technical safeguard and a boundary around a newly networked form of consciousness, adopted after some of the people most capable of going online were among the first to die.

Discovery and the First Warning

After Bartek and Rytka reached Google, the familiar search page briefly felt like a return to a homeland. Its graphic of manga robots shielding their heads with metal and tinfoil led to the Apocalypse FAQ. The first instruction was categorical: a machine being used for processing must not be connected to the Internet. The FAQ then opened out into a practical survival resource, with contact addresses, websites sorted by language, culture, and religion, HTL and MTL tables, and forums and blogs devoted to survival despair.

The discovery also corrected Bartek’s assumption that he and Rytka were alone in arriving at the IS3 idea. The warning belonged to a much wider response to the same crisis: other people had independently pursued mind scanning, and the FAQ gathered information for a scattered population trying to survive its consequences. Its opening rule gives that collection an immediate priority. Before debate or community-building comes containment.

How the Rule Works

Later, Bartek recalled the FAQ while discussing what had happened to the early transformed population. Those with programming skills had initially been prominent, but many then entered the open web, where they could move their minds through the Internet; they died. The account does not establish a single confirmed cause. Bartek’s companions suggest either malware released onto the network or incompatibility in software that had not been written for this use.

The precaution that follows is more specific than a general ban on communication. The safe route is through dedicated connections, on machines pre-formatted to zero and protected by a tight RioBit secure connection protocol. Bartek had needed to download and install that protocol to log in, and the FAQ contained the instructions. The rule therefore separates the dangerous open network from a controlled channel whose equipment and access are deliberately constrained.

That protection carried a cost. With only mechanical fingers, typing on keyboards and tapping screens made online interaction cumbersome. The group was working on USB filters and bypasses, but the people able to develop them were scarce; the work had fallen to amateurs, ignoramuses, and teenage gamers. The safety regime was not a frictionless solution but a difficult compromise: preserve communication without repeating the exposure that had killed earlier users.

A Rule in a Networked World

The rule’s force becomes clearer against the book’s other forms of distributed intelligence. Bartek describes the irigotchi as children’s toys whose processors were designed to learn from their individual owners. After the Extermination, in the absence of humans, they formed herds and modified their shared neuro-architecture. A street herd could pass over Bartek without recognizing him, while a deliberately assembled network of toys might be built up around an individual. These examples make connection consequential: a network can support learning and collective behavior, but its effects depend on what is connected, how, and under what conditions.

Elsewhere, irigotchi vectors spread through networked matter along the Charles River, arranging leaves and branches into fractal patterns and then beginning again when Bartek blew them away. Some had flowed across the MIT Mothernet in expanses of five or even ten square kilometers, shining at night as the last lights on the Boston skyline. Bartek also describes authority in Paradise as difficult to locate, blurred among persons, programs, collectives, and procedures, with Lady Spiro herself possibly grown from a mixture of humano-transformers, a long-lived Matternet vector, or managerial software. These passages do not identify those systems as violations of the FAQ rule; rather, they show why the rule matters in a world where networked processes can acquire reach and agency beyond any one machine or operator.

Significance and Limits

The prohibition is not presented as proof that the Internet itself was malicious, nor does the story settle whether malware or incompatibility caused the deaths. It is a precaution formed under uncertainty, reinforced by the memory of the FAQ’s first instruction and by the fatal experience of users who went online immediately after transformation. Its bluntness contrasts with the improvised, inconvenient work of building safer connections, where technical safeguards still depend on limited expertise and imperfect tools.

The rule also marks a change in what a computer connection can mean. A machine processing a mind copy is not treated as an ordinary workstation: connecting it to the open web risks exposing a person’s consciousness to systems whose behavior is not understood. The FAQ’s warning is therefore both technical and social. It tells survivors how to handle equipment, while making isolation the first condition of continued life in a world where thought itself can travel through networks.