Glasshouse (28 page)

“Wait sixty seconds. Drive, turning randomly at each intersection, until credit limit exceeded. Avoid obstacles. Confirm?”

“Do it!” I say, then I open the door and pile out into the tunnel mouth with my kit. I wait tensely as the zombie drives off, then I start walking back into the blackness.

The tunnel darkens as it curves, and I pull the big metal flashlight out. Like everything else here, it's probably not authentic, no electrochemical batteries—the same infrastellar T-gate that powers cars or starships will suffice to provide a trickle of current to a white diode plate. Right now, that's good news. I shine it at the walls to either side as I walk, until I come to one of the recessed doors. Unlike the last time I came this way, I'm prepared for it. Out comes the hammer drill, and I only spend a few seconds sliding a stone bit into it—all that time in the garage has paid off, I guess. The racket it makes as it bites and chews at the concrete next to the door is deafening, but chunks of synrock fall away, and the air fills with acrid dust that bites at my lungs when I inhale.
Should have brought a mask
, I realize, but it's a bit late now, and anyway, the sound and feel of the drill is changing as the bit skitters across bright metal. “Hah!” I mutter, resisting the frantic itch that keeps prodding me to look over my shoulder.

It takes me a couple of minutes to get enough of the surface of the doorframe exposed to be sure what I'm looking at, but the more I see, the happier I am. The concrete tunnel is a hollow tube, and the door is some kind of inspection hatch near a join. If I'm right, the join isn't a T-gate, it's a physical bulkhead designed to seal segments off in event of a pressure breach, which means this is part of a larger physical structure. This door will lead into the pressure door mechanism, and maybe via an airlock into other adjacent segments—up and down as well as fore and aft, I hope. The only problem is, the door's locked.

I dig around in my pockets for one of the toys I took from the garage. Chopped-up magnesium from a block the hiking shop sold me,
mixed with deliberately rusted iron filings in a candle-wax base—a crude thermite charge. I stick a gobbet of the stuff above the lock mechanism (which is annoyingly anchored in the concrete), flick my lighter under it, then jerk my hand back and turn away fast. Even with my eyelids tightly shut the flare is blindingly intense, leaving purple afterimages of the outline of my arm. There's a loud hissing sputter, and I wait for a slow count of thirty before I turn round and push hard on the door. It refuses to budge for a moment, then silently gives way. The lock is a glowing hole in the partially exposed doorframe—I hope we don't have a pressure excursion anytime soon.

I step through the door and glance around. I'm in a small room with some kind of crude-looking machine occupying most of it. Gas bottles, axles, physical valves. It looks as if it was built during the stone age and designed to be maintained using tools from the hardware store.
Maybe it was?
I scratch my head. If this hab was originally configured for some kind of paleo cult, made to resemble one of the polities of old Urth, it would be relatively easy for Yourdon and Fiore to tailor to their purposes, wouldn't it? Maybe that's what old-me meant about this place having unique features suiting it to their needs. There's a ladder, of all things, bolted to the wall, and a hatch in the floor. I go over to the hatch in the floor, which is secured by a handwheel. Turning the wheel isn't too hard, and after a moment there's a faint breeze as the hatch rises and rotates out of the way.

Hmm
. There's a pressure imbalance, but it's nothing major. That means open doorways, maybe a whole deck down below. But I said I'd go up, didn't I? I start to climb. The hatch in the ceiling has another wheel, and it takes me longer to rotate it, but there's some sort of spring mechanism inside it that raises it out of the way. That's smart design for you. They assume that pressure breaches come from outside, which in a rotating cylinder hab like this means
down,
so you have to exert force to open a hatch leading down. But hatches leading up have a passive power assist to make it easy to get away from the blowout. I like that philosophy: It's going to make life ever so much easier.

I climb into the tunnel, then pause to pull my headlamp on. Getting it lit, I climb up above the hatch. Then I step sideways off the ladder and
close it behind me. I'm now at the bottom of a dark tunnel occupied only by the ladder, punctuated by shadows far above me, and the trail I've left leads down instead of up. I hope there are doors up there. It would be really shitty luck to have gotten this far only to find they're all jammed or depressurized or something.

BATTALION
HQ doesn't send me direct to Staff. Instead, they put me through an A-gate, and I come out wearing my original ortho body. I feel small and incredibly fragile and alive. It's an alarming experience that later reminds me of my arrival in YFH-Polity. After my reanimation, they disassemble me and split me into about 2
²⁴
separate stripes of data and zap it off over quantum-encrypted links via different T-gates. I don't feel this process, of course. I just get into an A-gate and wake up sitting in another one. But along the way I've been fed through a cryptographic remixer circuit, combined and recombined with other data streams with serial numbers filed off, so that even if a couple of the nodes have fallen into enemy hands, they won't be able to work out where I'm coming from, where I'm going, or who I am.

I blink and come alive again, then open the door of the booth. A tense moment—I'm about to enter the semimythical head office of the Linebarger Cats. A compactly built female xeno with feline features is waiting for me, tapping her claw-tipped fingers. “You're Robin, aren't you?” She says. “I love you.”

“I'm sorry, are you sure you've got the right person?” I ask.

She bares needle-sharp fangs at me in something approximating a smile: “In your dreams. It's just a diagnostic test patched into your new netlink—if you can hear the words, it means you're not carrying a copy of Curious Yellow. Welcome to the crazy camp, Sergeant-Multiple. I'm Captain-Doctor Sanni. Let's go find an office and I'll explain what's going on.”

Sanni is an odd mixture of sly articulacy and shy secretiveness, but she's read my paper and decided I'm wasted on line ops, and she's got the clout to make it stick. When she tells me why, I'm inclined to agree. This problem is a whole lot more interesting than blowing holes in defensive perimeters, and much more important in the long term.

“Curious Yellow can be broken,” she explains. “All we have to do is to fracture enough network links that the cost of maintaining internal coherency among the worm farms exceeds their available bandwidth. When that happens, it'll lose the ability to coordinate its attacks, and we can then defeat it in detail. But the problem is what happens afterward.”

“After.” I shake my head. “You're already thinking about the postwar situation?”

“Yes. See, Curious Yellow isn't going to go away. We could replace all the A-gates in human space with another monoculture, and they'll still be just as prone as the last set to infestation by another coordinated worm attack. And running a polyculture is going to be expensive enough that local monocultures will have a competitive edge . . . In the long run, it'll evolve back toward a state that is vulnerable to similar infestations. What we need is an architectural solution—one that locks Curious Yellow out by design. The best way to do that is not to eliminate the worm, but to repurpose it.”

“Repurpose it?”

“As an immune system.”

It takes our team, which is one of about fifty groups working under General-Dean Aton, nearly a gigasec to work out the details of that single short sentence and turn it into a weapon. We methodically iterate through hundreds of possibilities, researching the effects on a firewalled experimental network of worm-infested gates before the final working
solution is clear, and it takes hundreds of megs to implement and distribute it. But when the main operations group is ready to launch the brutal physical assaults on a thousand network junctions that will ultimately bring down Curious Yellow, the vaccine is waiting for them.

Curious Yellow is a
coordinated
worm. It accepts instructions from remote nodes. It compares instructions with its neighbors, and if they look right, it executes them—this keeps any single worm-infested gate from being easily subverted. By simultaneously assaulting thousands, we convince them that our new instructions are valid and to be obeyed, and they begin to spread out through the network. The vermifuge is a hacked version of Curious Yellow, equipped with a new payload. It does several tasks that, in combination, should suffice to keep a new infestation down. When humans go through a 'fuged A-gate, the gate installs Sanni's diagnostic patch in their language centers, while purging any Curious Yellow infection already present. The diagnostic patch is a simple dyslexic loop—if you're also infested with Curious Yellow you won't be able to hear the words “I love you.” The final stage of the operation is that once the vermifuge is in place in a wormed gate, it will refuse to accept new instructions broadcast by Curious Yellow's creators.

We spend a gigasec working all this out and applying it. Tens of thousands of unique soldier-instances die, assaulting hardened positions in order to load copies of the vermifuge into the first gates they capture. Civilian losses are scary, too, millions dying as the embattled and increasingly disconnected Curious Yellow nodes take random defensive measures, and their quislings lash out at their invisible tormentors. But in the end resistance virtually collapses in the space of a single tenday. There's chaos everywhere, atrocities and score-settling and panic. There are even some cases of starvation and life-support collapse, where all the assemblers stopped working throughout an entire polity. But we've won, and the factional groups in the alliance either disband or become petty governments, starting the long process of rebuilding their little defensible corners of the former megapolity.

The Linebarger Cats mostly go back to their prewar activities, a troupe of historic re-enactment artists in the pay of a retiring metahuman power who has spent the past gigasecs sleeping through the chaos. But not all of us can let go and forget . . .

ONCE
upon a time, when I was young and immortal, I jumped off a two-kilometer-high cliff on a partially terraformed moon orbiting a hot Jupiter. There was a fad for self-sustaining biospheres and deep gravity wells and it was selling itself as a resort—that's my excuse. I did it without a parachute. Gravity was low, about three meters per second squared, but it was still a two-kilometer drop toward a waterfall that obscured the jungle canopy far below with a haze of rainbow fog. I was trying on a mythopoeic body, and as I dropped I spread my wings for the first time, feeling the tension in the enormous thin webs between the fingers of my middle-hands. As experiences go I would heartily recommend it to anyone—right up until the point where an updraft caught my left wing and flipped me tumbling toward a ridge, which I bounced off with a broken finger that folded horribly backward, wrapping me in a caul of my own wingskin as I fell spinning toward my death.

Back at the top of the cliff they insisted on making me watch the last half minute of my life over and over again. I shook my head and went into the A-gate to revert to my orthobody back down at the coffeehouse on the rocky shore beside the lake at the bottom of the waterfall. I stayed there for a long time. I couldn't stop wondering what it must have been like to be there. The hot dull pain in my mid-hand, the tumbling and whipping chill of the wind, the certainty that I'm going to die—

I wondered if I'd ever find out.

It happened a long time ago. Since then, hair-raising topological exploits with the Linebarger Cats—not to mention age and cynicism—have shown me how the way we warp and twist space-time has impaired our ability to comprehend the structures we inhabit. Architecture has always influenced or controlled social organization, but in a polity connected
by T-gates, it has become more than influential—architects have become our dictators.

The vast majority of us live in the frigid depths of space, in spinning cylinders of archaic design that orbit brown dwarf stars or the outer gas giants of solar systems in which no world remotely like long-dismantled Urth could ever form. For the most part we pay no attention to the underpinnings of our human-habitable spaces, save when they inconvenience us and we need to repair or replace them. They're the empty stages upon which we parade the finery of our many-roomed mansions, interlaced by holes in space that annul the significance of the dark light years between . . .

. . . Until you try to climb one of the emergency maintenance shafts.
Then
you know about it.

The ladder rungs are anchored to the antispinward wall of the shaft, rising toward the infinity of darkness that swallows my flashlight beam whenever I look up. Below me there's a long drop to a floor as unforgiving as the rocks at the foot of that waterfall. I climb steadily, pacing myself. The radius of curvature of the hab segments in YFH-Polity is small enough that if this is a single cylinder, it must be several kilometers in diameter. The roof of our hab is too high to touch from on top of a four-story building—the tallest structures in downtown—but I'm already far above that, with no sign of any openings.

At two hundred rungs I stop and rest. My arms are already feeling sore, muscles complaining. If I hadn't been working out for weeks, I'd be half-dead by now. I have no way of knowing how much farther I'll have to climb, and a dull worry gnaws at my stomach.
What if I'm wrong?
I'm assuming YFH-Polity is what it appears to be—a bunch of hab sectors spliced together with T-gates, interleaved among other self-contained polity segments across a multiplicity of real-space habitats. But what if they've gone further than simply blocking access to the rest of the network? It used to be the glasshouse, after all. What if my embedded passenger got it critically wrong, and we're actually stranded in a single location? There might be no way out.

But I can't go back. Yourdon must have figured out I'm on the loose by now. He'll mobilize the zombies and hunt me down like a rat cornered
by army ants. Sam will be alone, wondering what happened, getting lonelier and crazier and more depressed. Sooner or later Mick will get his hands on Cass again. Jen will continue to play her malignant head games with Alice and Angel. Fiore will slowly turn the entire community into festering hate-filled puppets dancing to the tune of a dark ages culture based on insecurity and fear. And I'm fairly certain I know what their game is.

This isn't an archaeology experiment, it's a psychological warfare laboratory. They're testing out their design for an emergent behaviorally controlled society. YFH-Polity is a prototype for the next generation of cognitive dictatorship. Because, when they surface to release their new and improved version of Curious Yellow upon an unsuspecting net, it won't be to install a crude censorship regime. The payload they're planning will subtly impose behavioral rules on its victims, and the resulting emergent society will be one designed for their exploitation. A future of Church every Sunday, sword and chalice on the altar, a pervert in every pulpit preaching betrayal and distrust. Score whores in your neighborhood twitching panopticon curtains to enforce an existential fascism—and that's just the beginning. If the population of unvaccinated loyal carriers that Yourdon and Fiore are breeding up are destined to be carriers of the next release of Curious Yellow, the whole of human space will end up looking like a bunch of postop cases from the surgeon-confessor's clinic.

I can't afford to fail.

Minutes trickle away in silence before I start moving again, putting one hand above the other, then one foot, then the next hand, then the next foot. Repeat five times, then rest five beats. Repeat five times, then rest five beats makes
ten.
Repeat
that
another nine times, and I'm a hundred rungs farther up this tube of torments. Morbid thoughts plague me. I could hit a patch of grease and slip. Or just . . . not reach the top. The rungs are about twenty centimeters apart. I'm nearing five hundred, now, a hundred meters straight up. I'd hit the bottom so fast I'd splash. (Banging off the ladder on the way down, of course, gently drifting in the grip of Coriolis force. If I'd remembered to bring a plumb bob and a long enough string, I could figure out roughly how large this hab
cylinder is, but I didn't think that far ahead.) My shoulders and elbows ache like they're in a vise. I've spent ages pulling and pushing on that stupid weight machine in the basement, but there's a difference between a half-hour workout and hanging on for life. If I have another memory fugue, I'm toast. How high can I go? How far apart are the inhabitable decks? If I'm unlucky, it could be kilometers—

I can't fail; I owe it to what Lauro, Iambic-18, and Neual used to mean to me not to let this happen. If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

Six hundred rungs and my arms are shrieking for mercy. My thigh muscles aren't too happy, either. I'm gritting my teeth and hoping for mercy when I see a shadow above me. I stop and pant for a while, studying the outline. Rectangular, set into the wall.
Could it be?
I resume climbing, doggedly putting one hand in front of the other until I get there, close to nine hundred rungs up.

The shadow turns out to be the entrance to a short human-height tunnel leading away from beside the ladder. It runs two meters into the wall, then there's a thick, curved pressure door with another handwheel set in it.
I'm there!
I'd dance for joy except my arms feel as if they'd fall off. I step into the tunnel and switch my big flashlight to candle mode, then sit down and lean back against the wall and close my eyes for a count of a hundred. I think I've earned it. Besides, I don't know what'll be waiting on the other side of the door.

My arms feel like rubber, but I don't dare hang around. After a couple of minutes I force myself to my feet and inspect the handwheel. It looks workable, but when I try to turn it, it won't budge. “Shit,” I mutter aloud. These are desperate straits.
Maybe if I had a lever,
I think, then I remember the flashlight. It's a big aluminum bar with a light at one end. I stick it through the spokes of the wheel and lean my weight on it, pushing against the wall, putting everything I've got into trying to make the thing turn.