  Mechanical computing has seen resurgent interest recently owing to the
potential to embed sensing and computation into new classes of programmable
metamaterials. To realize this, however, one must push signals from one part of
a device to another, and do so in a way that can be reset robustly. We
investigate the propagation of signals in a bistable mechanical cascade uphill
in energy. By identifying a penetration length for perturbations, we show that
signals can propagate uphill for finite distances and map out parameters for
this to occur. Experiments on soft elastomers corroborate our results.
