u/erinoco

There is a side door into the factory which opens onto a public pathway. "DO NOT ENTER" is chalked onto this door.

You find yourself increasingly curious about the factory, particularly as it seems to be left alone by teenagers, vagrants, and other types who usually frequent abandoned buildings. While a lot of information on the building is publicly available, no one seems to have any interest or curiosity about the building. Whenever you mention it to other people, even when walking past it, they appear to lose interest and focus, turning away from it or bringing up other topics.

Finally, you induce one of your friends to concentrate and hold their interest in the subject. You convince them to take on a quick exploration of the building. You both make your way to the side door. You place your hand on the door plate. and...

wake up the next morning in your own bed. You have no recollection whatsoever of the intervening period. You phone your friend, who professes to remember nothing at all about your suggestion, and appears to believe that you have been dreaming or hallucinating. None of the people you meet who should have seen you that day appears to think anything out of the ordinary happened, although they are unable to confirm anything you did personally after the time you set out for the building.

You head back to the factory. The chalked message on the side door has now changed: "IF YOU COME AGAIN, YOU WILL REMEMBER." You show this message to others, but they either ignore the message, or treat it as an innocuous message that does not have you in mind.

Do you attempt to enter through the side door again?

On arrival, you find yourself in a clearing in a large forest. A person, dressed in clothes of our time and speaking English, materialises next to you.

The person explains that they do not really exist: they are an artificial creation by the humans of their time, specifically designed to interact with you as soon as your presence was registered. Almost all humans have chosen to become incorporeal presences, and live in a shadow realm that allows them to satisfy needs and wants, to create their own pocket worlds, to travel through spacetime, and to manipulate the physical world. There are significant qualifications and limitations, but the person cannot explain it to you without a significant knowledge dump, which cannot happen unless you become incorporeal yourself. The person could teach you the full ramifications and drawbacks the old-fashioned way, but estimates this will take 5-10 years.

As humans abandoned their bodies, they re-wilded Earth as much as possible, eliminating as much evidence of past human development as they could. A small group of humans refused to join in. They have become (partially by deliberate acts) a civilisation of small groups of hunter gatherers over several generations. They regard the humans who took the other path as evil ghosts, passing down their lore orally.

The person offers you three choices. You can join the incorporeal society if you wish. Or you can join the hunter-gatherers, who speak no language you would recognise beyond a few words, and who might be hostile. The person warns you that they will not permit you to make any technological changes beyond a few minor innovations, such as better ways to catch fish or choose good plants to eat. You will be given a means of communicating with the person if you wish to make a change; but any departures without their approval will be met with a final warning to desist in the first instance, and instant death in the second.

The third choice would be to on with your time machine. According to the person, going forward in time and going back in time are actually two very different processes, and you can't accomplish the latter unless you are incorporeal.

Which option do you choose?

Six of us on the security team, somewhere around 4,000 assets between cloud and the stuff still sitting on-prem. Feels like every week there's another "critical" CVE or zero-day and a bunch of feeds all yelling at once. Most of it doesn't even touch what we run, but I still end up spending half my morning going ok do we actually have this, is it exposed, does it matter for us.

By the time I've checked the threat report details against our inventory and figured out if it's even reachable, half the day's gone and there's a new one waiting.

So how do you handle it? I don't want to ignore something I shouldn't, but I also can't chase every headline. More interested in the triage side than "just patch everything." How do you decide what's actually worth your time.