Glasshouse (23 page)

“But those are all externals! They're not
you.
You won't tell me anything! Where do you come from? Did you ever have a family? What happened to them?”

He looks anxious, and suddenly I realize he's afraid of me.
Afraid?
Of me?
I take a step back. And then I register what my face probably looks like right now, and it's like all my blood is replaced with ice water of an instant, because his question has dredged up a memory that was, I think, one of the ones my earlier self deliberately forgot before the surgery, because he knew it would surface again and forgetting it hurt but knowing it might be erased by crude surgical intervention was even worse. And I sit down hard on the bench and look away from him because I don't want to see his sympathy.

“They all died in the war,” I hear myself saying woodenly. “And I don't want to talk about it.”

WHEN
I sleep, another horror story dredges itself up from my suppressed memories and comes to visit. This time I know it's genuine and true and really happened to me, and there's nothing I can do to change it in any detail—because that's what makes it so nightmarish.

The ending has already been written, and it is not a happy one.

In the dream, I am a gracile male orthohuman with long, flowing green hair and what my partners describe as a delightful laugh. I am a lot younger—barely three gigs—and I'm also happy, at least at first. I'm in a stable family relationship with three other core partners, plus various occasional liaisons with five or six fuckbuddies. We're fully bisexual, either naturally or via a limbic system mod copied from bonobos. My family has two children, and we're thinking about starting another two in half a gig or so. I'm also lucky enough to have a vocation, researching the history of the theory of mind—an aspect of cultural ideology that only became important after the Acceleration, and which goes in and out of fashion, but which I hold to be critically important. The history of my field, for example, tells us that for almost a gigasecond during the old-style twenty-third century, most of humanity-in-exile were zimboes, quasi-conscious drones operating under the aegis of an overmind. How that happened and how the cognitive dictatorship was broken is something I'm studying with considerable interest and not a few field trips to old memory temples.

One of these visits is the reason I am not at home with my family when Curious Yellow comes howling out of nowhere to erase large chunks of history, taking with it an entire interstellar civilization, and (to make things personal) my family.

I'm visiting a Mobile Archive Sucker in the full physical flesh when Curious Yellow first appears. The MASucker is a lumbering starship, effectively a mobile cylinder habitat, powered by plasma piped from the interior of a distant A0 supergiant via T-gate. It wallows along at low relativistic speeds between brown dwarf star systems, which in this part of the galaxy are spaced less than a parsec apart. During the multigigasecond intervals between close encounters, the crew retreats into template-frozen backup, reincarnating from the ship's assemblers whenever things get interesting. The ship is largely self-sufficient and self-maintaining (apart from its stellar tap, and a tightly firewalled T-gate to the premises of the research institute that created it centuries ago). Its internal systems are entirely offnet from the polity at large because it's designed for a mission duration of up to a terasecond, and it was envisaged from the start that civilization would probably collapse at least once within the working life of the ship. That's why I've come out here in person to interview Vecken, the ship's Kapitan, who lived shortly after the cognitive dictatorship and may have recollections of some of the survivors.

Now here's a curious thing: I can't remember their faces. I remember that Lauro, Iambic-18, and Neual were not simply important to me, not just lovers, but in a very real way defined who I was. A large chunk of my sense of identity was configured around this key idea that I wasn't solitary: that I was part of a group, that we'd collectively adjusted our neuroendocrinology so that just being around the others gave us a mild endorphin rush—what used to be a haphazard process called “falling in love”—and we'd focused on complementary interests and skills and vocations. It wasn't so much a family as a superorganism, and it was a fulfilling, blissful state of affairs. I think I may have had a lonely earlier life, but I don't remember much of that because I guess it paled into insignificance in comparison.

But I can't remember their faces, and even now—a lifetime after the grief has ebbed—that bugs me.

Neual was quick with hands and feet, taking slyly sarcastic delight in winding me up. Lauro had perfect manners but lost it when making love with us. Iambic-18 was a radical xenomorph, sometimes manifesting in more than one body at the same time when the fancy took it. Our children . . .

Are all dead, and it is unquestionably my fault. The nature of Curious Yellow is that it propagates stealthily between A-gates, creating a peer-to-peer network that exchanges stegged instructions using people as data packets. If you have the misfortune to be infected, it installs its kernel in your netlink, and when you check into an A-gate for backup or transport—which proceeds through your netlink—CY is the first thing to hit the gate's memory buffer. A-gate control nodes are supposedly designed so that they can't execute data, but whoever invented CY obviously found a design flaw in the standard architecture. People who have been disassembled and reassembled by the infected gates infect fresh A-gates as they travel. CY uses people as a disease vector.

The original CY infection that hit the Republic of Is installed a payload that was designed to redact historical information surrounding some event—I'm not sure what, but I suspect it's an aftershock left by the destruction of one of the old cognitive dictatorships—by editing people as they passed through infected gates. But it only activated once the infection had spread across the entire network. So Curious Yellow appeared everywhere with shocking abruptness, after spreading silently for hundreds of megasecs.

In my memory-dream, I am taking tea in the bridge of the
Grateful for Duration,
which in that time takes the form of a temple to a lake kami from old Nippon. I'm sitting cross-legged opposite Septima (the ship's curator) and waiting for Kapitan Vecken to arrive. As I spool through some questions I stored offline, my netlink hiccups. There's a cache-coherency error, it seems—the ship's T-gate has just shut down.

“Is something going on?” I ask Septima. “I've just been offlined.”

“Might be.” Septima looks irritated. “I'll ask someone to investigate.” She stares right through me, a reminder that there are three or four other copies of this strange old archivist wandering the concentric cylinder habs of the ship.

She blinks rapidly. “It appears to be a security alert. Some sort of intruder just hit our transcription airgap. If you wait here a moment, I'll go and find out what's going on.”

She walks over toward the door of the teahouse and, as far as I can reconstruct later, this is the precise moment, when a swarm of eighteen thousand three hundred and twenty-nine wasp-sized attack robots erupt from the assembler in my family's home. We live in an ancient dwelling patterned on a lost house of old Urth called Fallingwater, a conservative design from before the Acceleration. There are doors and staircases and windows in this house, but no internal T-gates that can be closed, and the robots rapidly overpower Iambic-18, who is in the kitchen with the gate.

They deconstruct Iambic-18 so rapidly there is no time for a scream of pain or pulse of netlinked agony. Then they fan out through the house in a malignant buzzing fog, bringing rapid death. A brief spray of blood here and a scream cut short there. The household assembler has been compromised by Curious Yellow, our backups willfully erased to make room for the wasps of tyranny, and, although I don't know it yet, my life has been gracelessly cut loose from everything that gave it meaning.

After the executions, they eat the physical bodies and excrete more robot parts, ready to self-assemble into further attack swarms that will continue the hunt for enemies of Curious Yellow.

I know about this now because Curious Yellow kept logs of all the somatic kills it made. Nobody knows why Curious Yellow did this—one theory is that it is a report for CY's creators—but I have watched the terahertz radar map of the security wasps eating my family and my children so many times that it is burned into my mind. I'm one of the rare survivors among the millions targeted as somatic enemies, to be destroyed rather than edited. And now it's as if I'm watching it again
for the first time, reliving the horror that made me plead with the Linebarger Cats to take me in and turn me into a tank. (But that was half a gigasecond later, when the
Grateful for Duration
made contact with one of the isolated redoubts of the resistance.)

I
realize I'm awake, and it's still nighttime. My cheeks itch from the salty tracks of tears shed in my sleep, and I'm curled up in an uncomfortable position, close to one edge of the bed. There's an arm around my waist, and a breathing breeze on the back of my neck. For a moment I can't work it out, but then it begins to make sense to me. “I'm awake now,” I murmur.

“Oh. Good.” He sounds sleepy. How long has he been here? I went to bed alone—I feel a momentary stab of panic at the thought that he's here uninvited, but I don't want to be alone. Not now.

“Were you asleep?” I ask.

He yawns. “Must have. Dozed off.” His arm tenses, and I tense, too, and push myself back toward the curve of his chest and legs. “You were unhappy.”

“What I didn't tell you earlier.” And I'm still not sure it's a good idea to tell him. “My family. Curious Yellow killed them.”

“What? But Curious Yellow didn't kill, it edited—”

“Not everyone.” I lean against him. “Most people it edited. Some of us it hunted down and murdered. The ones who might have been able to work out who made it, I think.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Not many people do. You were either directly affected, in which case you were probably dead, or it happened to someone else, and you were busy rebuilding your life and trying to make your struggling firewalled micropolity work without all the external inputs provided by the rest of Is-ness. A gig after the end of the war it was old news.”

“But not for you.”

I can feel Sam's tension through his arm around me.

“Look, I'm tired, and I don't want to revisit it. Old pains, all right?” I try and relax against the side of his body. “I've become a creature of
solitary habits. Didn't do to get too close to anyone during the war, and since then, haven't had the opportunity.”

His breathing is deep and even. Maybe he's already asleep. I close my eyes and try to join him, but it takes me a long time to drift off. I can't help wondering how badly he must have been missing contact with another human being, to share my bed again.

MONDAY
is a working day, and it's also usually a lunch date, but I'm not about to break bread with Jen after yesterday's events. I head for work with the brass key hidden in my security bag. Once inside I rip into the filing and cleaning immediately. It's midmorning before I realize that Janis hasn't arrived yet.

I hope she's all right. I don't remember seeing her yesterday, but if she's heard about what happened—well, I don't know how close to the victims she was, but I can only imagine what she must be going through if she knew them well. She was feeling ill a couple of days ago—how is she now?

I head for the front desk. Business is dead today, and I haven't had a single visitor, so I have no qualms about flipping the sign on the door to CLOSED for a while. In the staff room there's a file of administrative stuff, and after leafing through it for a bit, I find Janis's home number. I dial it, and after a worryingly long time someone answers the telephone.

“Janis?”

Her voice sounds tired, even through the distortion the telephone link seems to be designed to add. “Reeve, is that you?”

“Yes. I was getting worried about you. Are you all right?”

“I've been sick today. And to tell the truth, I didn't feel like coming in. Do you mind?”

I look around. “No, the place is dead as a—” I stop myself just in time. “Listen, why don't you take a couple of days off? You were going to be leaving in a couple of months anyway, there's no point overdoing it. If you want, I'll drop round with some books on my next day off, day after tomorrow. How about that?”

“That sounds great,” she says gratefully, and after a bit more chat I hang up.

I'm just shifting the
CLOSED
sign back to
OPEN
when a long black limousine draws up at the curb outside. I manage a sharp intake of breath—
What's Fiore doing here today?
—before the Priest gets out, and then, uncharacteristically, holds the door open for someone else. Someone wearing a purple dress and a skullcap. I realize exactly who it must be—the Bishop: Yourdon.

The Bishop turns out to be as cadaverously thin and tall as Fiore is squat and bulbous. A stork and a toad. There's a peculiarly sallow cast to his skin, and his cheekbones stand out like blades. He wears spectacles with thick hornlike rectangular frames, and his hair hugs his scalp in lank swatches the color of rotten ivory. He strides forward, skeletal-looking hands writhing together, as Fiore bumbles along huffing and puffing to keep up in his wake. “I say, I say!” Fiore calls. “Please—”

The Bishop pushes the library door open, then pauses. His eyes are a very pale blue, with slightly yellowish whites, and his gaze is icily contemptuous. “You've fucked up before, Fiore,” he hisses. “I do wish you'd keep your little masturbatory fantasies to yourself in future.” Then he turns round to face me.

“Hello?” I force a smile.

He looks at me as if I'm a machine. “I am Bishop Yourdon. Please take me to the document repository.”

“Ah, yes, certainly.” I hurry out from behind the desk and wave him toward the back.

Fiore harrumphs and breathes heavily as he waddles after us, but Yourdon moves with bony grace, as if all his joints have been replaced with well-lubricated bearings. Something about him makes me shudder.
The look he gave Fiore—I can't remember having seen such an expression of pure contempt on a human face in a very long time. I lead them to the room; the Grim Reaper stalking along behind me in angry silence, followed by a bumbling oleaginous toad.

I stand aside as we reach the reference section, and Fiore fumbles with his keys, visibly wilting under Yourdon's fuming gaze. He gets the door open and darts inside. Yourdon pauses, and fixes me with an ice-water stare. “We are not to be disturbed,” he informs me, “for
any
reason whatsoever. Do you understand?”

I nod vigorously. “I, I'll be at the front desk if you need me.” My teeth are nearly chattering.
What is it with this guy?
I've met misanthropes before, but Yourdon is something special.

Fiore and the Bishop hang out in the archive, doing whatever it is they do in there for almost three hours. At a couple of points I hear raised voices, Fiore's unctuous pleading followed by the Bishop hissing back at him like an angry snake. I sit behind the desk, forcing myself not to look over my shoulder every ten seconds, and try to read a book about the history of witch-hunts in preindustrial Europa and Merka. It contains disturbing echoes of what's going on here, communities fractured into mutually mistrustful factions that compete to denounce one another to greedy spiritual authorities drunk on temporal power. However, I find it hard to concentrate while the snake and the toad in the back room are making noises like they're trying to sting each other to death.

It's well into my normal lunch hour when Fiore and Yourdon surface. Fiore looks subdued and resentful. Yourdon appears to be in a better mood, but if this is his good humor, I'd hate to see him when he's angry. When he smiles he looks like a skull someone's stretched a sheet of skin over, colorless lips peeling back from yellowing teeth in a grin completely bereft of amusement. “You'd better get back to work then,” he calls to Fiore as he strides past my desk without so much as a nod in my direction. “You've got a lot of lost headway to make up.” Then he barges out through the front door as the long black limousine cruises round the edge of the block, ready to convey its master back to his usual haunts.

A few minutes later Fiore bumbles past me with a sullen glare. “I'll be round tomorrow,” he mutters, then stomps out the door. No limousine
for the Priest, who staggers off on foot in the noonday heat.
My, how the mighty are fallen!

I watch him until he's out of sight, then walk over and flip the sign on the door to CLOSED. Then I lock up and take a deep breath. I wasn't expecting this to happen today, but it's too good an opportunity to miss. I go fetch my bag from the staff room, then head for the repository.

It's time for the moment of truth. Less than a hundred seconds after Fiore left the building, I slide the laboriously copied key into the lock. My heart is pounding as I turn it. For a moment it refuses to budge, but I jiggle it—the teeth aren't quite engaging with the pins—and something falls into position and it squeals slightly and gives way. I push the door wide, then reach for the light switch.

I'm in a small room with no windows, no chairs, no tables, one bare electric bulb dangling on a wire from the ceiling, bookshelves on three walls, and a trapdoor in the middle of the floor.

“What
is
this shit?” I ask aloud, looking round.

There are box files on all the shelves, masses of box files. But there are no titles on the spines of the boxes, just serial numbers. Everything's dusty except the trapdoor, which has been opened recently. I inhale, then nearly go cross-eyed trying not to sneeze. If this is Fiore's idea of housekeeping, it's no wonder Yourdon was pissed at him.

I look at the nearest shelf and pull down one of the files at random. There's a button catch and I open it to find it's full of paper, yellowing sheets of the stuff, machine-smooth, columns of hexadecimal numbers printed in rows of dumb ink. There's a sequence number at the top of each sheet, and it takes me a few seconds to figure out what I'm looking at. It's a serialized mind map, what the ancients would have called a “hex dump.” Pages and pages of it. The box file probably holds about five hundred sheets. If all the others I see contain more of this stuff, then I'm probably looking at about a hundred thousand sheets, each containing maybe ten thousand characters. Whatever is stored in this incredibly inefficient serial medium, it isn't very big—about the same size as a small mammal's genome, maybe, once you squeeze out all the redundant exons. It's three or four orders of magnitude too small to be a map of a human being.

I shake my head and put the box file back. From the level of dust on top of it, it hasn't been touched for quite a time. I don't know what this stuff is, but it isn't what Fiore and Yourdon came here to look at. Which leaves the trapdoor.

I bend down and grab the brass ring, then lift. The wooden slab hinges up at the back, and I see a flight of steps leading down. They're carpeted, and there are wooden handrails to either side. Okay, so there's a secret basement under the library, I tell myself, trying not to giggle with fear. What have I been working on top of?

Of course I go downstairs. After what Fiore did to Phil and Esther, I'm probably dead if they find me in the repository. Taking the next step is a logical progression, nothing more.

The steps go down into twilight, but they don't go down very far. The floor is three meters below the trapdoor, and there's a light switch on the rail at the bottom. I flick it and glance around.

Guess what? I'm not in the dark ages anymore.

If I was still in the dark ages, this would be a musty basement with brick walls and wooden lath ceiling, or maybe poured concrete and steel beams. They weren't big on structural diamond back then, and their floors didn't grow zebrastripe fur, and they used short-lived electrical bulbs instead of surfacing their ceilings with fluorescent paint. There's a very retro-looking lounger in a mode that I'm sure went out of fashion some time between the end of the Oort colonial era and the first of the conservationista republics, and some weird black-resin chairs that look like the skeletons of insects, if insects grew four meters tall and supported themselves with endoskeletons.
Hmm.
I glance over my shoulder. Yes, if Yourdon and Fiore were having a knockdown shouting match in here with the hatch open, I might just about have heard it at the front desk.

The other items in the basement are a lot more disconcerting.

For starters, there's something that I am almost certain is a full military A-gate. It's a stubby cylinder about two meters high and two meters in diameter, its shell slick with the white opacity of carbonitrile armor. There's a ruggedized control workstation next to it, perched on a rough wooden plinth—you use those things in the field when you're
operating under emission control, to make field expedient whatever it is you need in order to save your ass.
Got plutonium? Got nuke.
Not that I've got the authentication ackles to switch the thing on—if I mess with it I'll probably set off about a billion alarms—but its presence here is as incongruous as a biplane in the bronze age.

For seconds, the walls are lined with racks of shelving bearing various pieces of equipment. There's what I'm fairly certain is a generator pack for a Vorpal sword, like the one on the Church altar. That brings back unpleasant memories, because I remember those swords and what you can do with them—blood fountaining out into a room where the headless corpses are already stacked like cordwood beside the evacuation gate—and it makes me feel nauseous. I take a quick breath, then I look at the shelves on the other side of the room. There are lots of them, some of them stacked with the quaint rectangular bricks of high-density storage, but most of the space is given over to ring binders full of paper. This time, instead of serial numbers on the spines, there are old-fashioned human-readable titles, although they don't mean much to me. Like
Revised Zimbardo Study Protocol 4.0
, and
Church Scale Moral Delta Coefficients
, and
Extended Host Selection Criteria
—

Host selection criteria?
I pull that one off the shelf and begin reading. An indeterminate time later I shake myself and put it back. I feel dirty, somehow contaminated. I really wish I didn't understand what it said, but I'm afraid I do, and now I'm going to have to figure out what to do with the knowledge.

I stare at the A-gate, speculating. There's a very good chance that it's not infected with Curious Yellow, because they wouldn't want to risk infecting themselves. But it still won't help me escape, and it probably won't work for me anyway unless I can hold a metaphorical gun to Fiore's head, threaten him with something even more frightening than the prospect of Yourdon's revenge—and if I've got the measure of Yourdon, any revenge he'd bother to carry out would truly be a worse fate than death.

Shit.
I need to think about this some more. But at least I've got until tomorrow, when Fiore returns.

BUSINESS
is dead, literally dead. After I go back up top and lock the repository, I flip the door sign to
OPEN
and sit at the front desk for a couple of hours, waiting tensely to see if the zombies are going to come and drag me off to prison. But nothing happens. I haven't tripped any alarms by my choice of lunchtime reading matter. With hindsight it's not too surprising. If there's one place Fiore and Yourdon and the mysterious Hanta won't want under surveillance, it's wherever they're hiding their experimental tools. Their kind doesn't thrive in the scrutiny of the panopticon. Which, as it happens, gives me an idea.

Midway through the afternoon I lock up for half an hour and hit the nearest electronics shop for a useful gadget. Then I spend a nervous hour installing it in the cellar. Afterward, I feel smug. If it works, it'll serve Fiore and Yourdon right for being overconfident—and for making this crazy simulation too realistic.