Glasshouse (27 page)

I spend my first gigasec among the Cats being a tank. There's very little that is human left in me once I get a clear picture of what's going on. It's not hard to generalize from the tales of random atrocities committed against people who specialize in the past; besides, the gigasecond of nonexistence I spent aboard
Grateful for Duration
is a small death in its own right—time enough for children to mature as adults, for spouses to despair, mourn, and move on. Even if by some miracle my family hasn't been targeted for liquidation because of my career, they're still lost to me. That sort of experience tends to make one bitter. Bitter enough to give up on humanity as a bad job, bitter enough to experiment with other, more sinister, identities.

About my body: I mass approximately two tons and stand three meters high at the shoulder. My nervous system is nonbiological—I'm running as a real-time sim with sensory engagement through my panzer's pain nerves. (The long-term dangers of complete migration into virtch are well understood, but avoidable to some extent by maintaining a somatotype and staying anchored in the real world. Besides which, there's an emergency to deal with.) If I have to, I can accelerate my mind to ten times normal speed. My skin is an exotic armor, pebbled with monocrystalline diamonds held in a shock-absorbent quantum dot matrix that can be fast-tuned to match the color of any background from radio frequencies through to soft X-rays. For fingernails I have retractable diamond claws, and for fists—clench and point—I have blasters. I don't eat, or breathe, or shit, but take power from a coil wrapped around an endless stream of plasma gated from the photosphere of a secret star.

As a callout sign I adopt the name
liddellhart.
The other Cats don't know what this signifies. Maybe that explains why over the bloody course of four hundred megs and sixteen engagements I end up being promoted to template-senior sergeant and replicated a hundredfold. Unlike Loral and some of the others, I don't freeze up when there's a problem. I don't experience shock and dissociation when I realize we've just decapitated twelve thousand civilians and shoved their heads into a
tactical assembler that is silently failing to back them up. I do what's necessary. I don't hesitate when it's necessary to sacrifice six of me in a suicide attack to buy time for the rest of the intrusion team to withdraw. I don't feel anything much except for icy hatred, and while I appreciate in the abstract that I'm sick, I'm not willing to ask for medical attention that might impair my ability to fight. Nor do our shadowy directors, who are watching over us all, see fit to override me.

For the first gigasec, we pursue the war by traditional methods. We find half-forgotten T-gates leading into polities under the control of Curious Yellow. We go through, shoot up the assemblers they're using as immigration firewalls, establish a toehold, fight our way in, install sanitized A-gates of our own, and forcibly run the civilian population through them to remove the Curious Yellow taint from their heads. The ones who survive usually thank us afterward.

At first it's relatively easy, but later we find we are attacking polities where the defenses are heavier, and later still Curious Yellow starts programming the civilians to fight bitterly and without quarter. I've seen naked children, shaking in the grip of an existential breakdown, walking toward panzers with Vorpal blades clutched inexpertly in both hands. And I've seen worse things than that. The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.

Quite late on in the campaign I realize this and, in a fitful flashback to my earlier self, I begin to spend some of my spare time thinking about the implications. My study of the psychology of collaboration becomes one of the most heavily accessed stacks in the Cats' internal knowledge base. So it probably shouldn't come as a surprise when I receive a summons to headquarters, combined with orders to converge my deltas and revert to orthohuman skin before transit.

At first I'm apprehensive. I've grown used to being an armored battalion, spending most of my seconds between action in icy orbit around a convenient failed star or exoplanet.
Breathing
and
eating
and
sleeping
and
emoting
are worrying, senseless handicaps. I recognize that they are of interest in comprehending the enemy motivational framework, and allowances must be made for them among the people we liberate, but why should I subject myself to the frailties of flesh? But eventually I realize that it's not about me. I need to be able to work with the headquarters staff. So I reconverge my various selves, erasing my identity from the kilotons of heavy metal that have until so recently been my limbs, and I report to the nearest field command node for up-processing.

WHEN
I come to, I find I'm leaning over the A-gate control panel. In my left hand I'm clutching a dripping knife so tightly that my fingers are close to cramping. There's blood halfway across the room, forming an obscene lake.

If I got it right, he won't have had time to use his netlink. He'll have been in acute physical agony as his head came out of the bag, then he'll have blacked out because of blood loss. Unconsciousness within ten seconds: It's more than he deserved.

But now I've got a huge problem, namely a hundred and ten kilos of dead meat lying in about ten liters of gore in the middle of a grass carpet that's already dying. Is this incriminating or what? Oh, and my sweater and skirt and sensible shoes are covered in blood. This does not look good.

I laugh, and it comes out as a hysterical giggle with more than a little madness in it.
This is bad,
I think.
But there's got to be something
—

For a moment I flash back to the time with the malfunctioning A-gate, the pools of fluid and lumps of deanimated meat. That helps stabilize me, in a way: It makes it clear what I have to do. I pick up Fiore's arm and give it an experimental tug. His sallow flesh ripples, and when I put my back into it, he jerks free of the carpet and skids a few centimeters toward me. I grunt and tug again, but it's not easy to move him so I pause for a bit and look around. There's some kind of cabling on one of the tool shelves, so I go over and grab a couple of meters of wire, twine it around his torso under the arms, and use it to pull him toward the A-gate. Finally, I get him into position, back inside the gate chamber.
It's hard to keep him inside—one leg keeps flopping out—but eventually I figure out that I can hold him in if I use the rest of the cable to truss him up.

“Okay, take five,” I tell myself breathlessly, bending over the field terminal.
Talking to yourself, Reeve?
I ask ironically.
Are we going mad, yet?
My fingers leave sticky reddish smears on it as I prod at virtch controls, but eventually I manage to bring up the conversational interface. The gate seems to have a load of scheduled background synthesis jobs queued up, but it's multitasking, and this is an interrupt: “Gate accept raw waste feedstock for disassembly okay.”

“Okay,” says the gate, and the door whines slightly as it seals around the evidence.

“Gate select template cleaning systems index that there, I want one of them,
make me one of them
okay.
”

“Okay, fabricating,” says the gate. “Time to completion, three hundred and fifty seconds after end of current job.” Ah, the conveniences of modern life.

I go upstairs to the common room and make myself a cup of tea.

While it's brewing, I strip off my outer clothes and drop them in the sink. We've got some basic cleaning equipment, and the detergent is pretty good at getting out stains, probably better than anything they had in the real dark ages. A couple of rinses, and my skirt and sweater are simply soaking wet, so I wring them out and drape them over the thermal vent and dial up the air temperature.

Back downstairs, I find the A-gate gaping open and the stuff I asked for sitting inside it. Fiore has been transformed into a carpet cleaning machine and a bunch of absorbent towels. It takes another trip upstairs to fill its tank with water. The smell of solvents makes me dizzy, but after half an hour I've gotten the visible bloodstains out of the carpet and off the walls and shelves. I can't easily do anything about the ceiling tiles, but unless you knew someone had been killed in here you'd just mistake the spots for a leak upstairs. So I put the carpet cleaner back in the gate and talk to myself.

“It's a blind,” I say, then yawn. It must be the adrenaline rush finally subsiding. “Fiore, Yourdon, and the other one. Psywar specialists
working on emergent group behavior controls.” The blackouts seems to have jostled free some more fragmentary memories, dossiers on—“War criminals. Ran the security apparat for the Third People's Glorious Future Sphere. When the vermifuge was released, they went on the run. They've spent the past gigasecs working on a countervermifuge, then on a way to harden Curious Yellow.”

I blink. Is this me, talking? Or a different me, using my speech centers to communicate with the rest of—whoever I am?

“Priority. Exfiltration. Priority. Exfiltration.” My hands are moving over the gate control systems even without me willing them. “Shit!” I yelp. But there's no stopping them, they know what they're doing. They seem to be setting up an output program.

“System unavailable,” says the gate, its tone of voice flat and unapologetic. “Longjump grid connectivity unavailable.”

Whatever my hands are doing, it doesn't seem to work. Something has shaken loose inside my memory, something vast and ugly. “You must escape, Reeve,” I hear my own voice telling me. “This program will auto-erase in sixty seconds. Network connectivity to external manifold is not available from this location. You must escape. Auto-erase in fifty-five seconds.”

Even though I'm only wearing clothes-liners, I break out in a cold sweat up and down my spine. “Who are you?” I whisper.

“This program will auto-erase in fifty seconds,” something inside me replies.

“Okay, I hear you! I'm going, I'm going already!” I'm terrified that when it says
this program
it means
me
—obviously it's some kind of parasite payload, like the Curious Yellow boot kernel. But where can I escape to? I look up, at the ceiling, and it clicks into place. I need to go
up
, through the walls of the world. Maybe, just maybe, this polity is interleaved with others—if so, if I can just break into an upper or lower deck, there may be a way to get to a T-gate and rejoin the manifold of the Invisible Republic. “Going up, right?”

“This program will auto-erase in thirty seconds. Escape vector approved. Conversational interface terminated.”

It goes very quiet in my head; I stand over the assembler terminal
shivering, taking rapid shallow breaths. A shadow seems to have passed from my mind, leaving only a cautious peace behind. The horror I feel is hollow, now, an existential dread—
So they hid zombie code inside me? Whoever they were?
—but I'm back, I'm still
me
. I'm not going to suddenly stop existing, to be replaced by a smiling meat puppet wearing my body. It was just an escape package, configured to report home after a preset period or some level of stress if I couldn't figure out what to do. When it couldn't dial out, it issued a callback to me, the conscious cover, and told me what it wanted. Which is fine. If I do what it wants and escape, then I can get any other little passengers dug out of my skull and everything will be great! And I want to escape anyway, don't I?
Don't I?
Think happy thoughts.

“Fuck, I just killed Fiore,” I whisper. “I've got to get out of here! What am I
doing
?”

Upstairs, the common room is as steamy as a sauna. Coughing and choking I dial down the heat, grab my damp clothes, and pull them on, then head for the door. Then—this is the hardest part—I pat my hair into order, pick up my bag, and calmly walk across the front lot toward the curb to hail a passing taxi.

“Take me home,” I tell the driver, teeth nearly chattering with fear.

Home,
the house I've shared with Sam for long enough to make it feel like somewhere I know, is a scant five minutes away by taxi. It feels like it's halfway to the next star system. “Wait here,” I tell the driver. I get out and head for the garage. I don't want to see Sam, I really hope he's at work—if he sees me, I might not be able to go through with this. Or even worse, he might get dragged in. But he's not around, and I manage to get into the garage and pick up my cordless hammer drill, a bunch of spare bits, and some other handy gadgets I laid aside against a rainy day. I go back to the taxi, and I'm still tightening the belt to hang everything off when it moves away.

We cruise up a residential street, low houses set back from the road behind white picket fences, separated by trees. It's hot outside, loud with the background creaking of arthropods. We drive into a tunnel entrance. I take a deep breath. “New orders. Stop right here and wait sixty seconds. Then drive through the tunnel and keep going. Keep your
radio turned off. At each road intersection, pick a direction at random and keep driving. Do not stop, other than to avoid obstructions. Accept one thousand units of credit. Continue driving until my credit expires. Confirm.” I bite my lower lip.