=Glitch= 
**Station Type:** Processor Locus
**Allegiance:** Independent
**Primary Languages:** English, Japanese, Russian
**Population:** 20,000
Glitch is the largest and most well-known processor locus. It has no embodied residents; everyone is an infomorph.
Glitch accepts visitors as long as they pass a few fairly simple memory and personality examinations. They screen for smart and imaginative people who work well with others. Most of the people they accept either bounce on out of here pretty quickly or they never leave. It looks like I’m going to be in the second category.
Even if you’ve spent a good bit of time as an infomorph, there’s no easy way to describe Glitch. The ﬁrst thing you realize is that it’s an incredibly rich and seriously enhanced environment. The instant you arrive you’re smarter and thinking faster than ever before. However, there’s a lot more than enhanced thinking going on there. They aren’t doing anything like the neo-synergists or anyone else who’s trying to make some sort of hive-mind, but between the cognitive speed-ups and the high bandwidth, communicating with other residents of Glitch isn’t like talking in meatspace—or even like communication in any other infomorph environment.
The standard communication protocols here include easier conveyance of emotions, thoughts, memories, and perceptions. Sharing a memory with someone else or temporarily linking your thoughts with theirs is as easy as opening a voice or full sensory channel. Sure, anyone can do this anywhere with a modern mesh architecture, but nowhere near this easily or this fast. The subroutines are sufﬁciently slick that all of this takes no more effort than saying hi to someone, and that’s both strange and amazing. It’s also addictive. Anyone who spends much time on Glitch is going to have trouble interacting with outsiders.
With 20,000 other residents to communicate with, and absolutely no lag-time on information transfers, Glitch becomes your entire world—and it’s an impressive one. Currently, there are a dozen planets simulated down to a level of detail well beyond the limits of perception. However, what’s going on here is a whole lot stranger than what it looks like from the inside. Glitch has a dedicated farcaster link with [[Bright]] in the [[Saturn]] system and another to [[Ilmarinen]] over in [[Neptune|Neptune’s]] L4. Most of the locals don’t bother communicating directly with anyone from either hab; the lag and lack of bandwidth makes communication too alien, but Glitch constantly shares data with both habs.
Radical infomorph enhancement is one of the major projects going on here. I haven’t gotten close to anyone at the top of that particular initiative, but it’s well funded and has highly skilled people working on it. While many of the cognitive researchers on Bright are currently focused on allowing individuals to become part of temporary, ad-hoc mental processing networks, here the goal is more about self-contained individual enhancement through a series of software upgrades to cognitive processing. There are rumors that one team is trying to turn infomorphs into something like seed AGIs, and that sounds like something that’s well worth looking into. I’ll see what I can ﬁnd out.

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