Glasshouse

by Charles Stross

  He nods. “I really don’t like this,” he says, miserably, a wave of his hand encompassing everything from his body outward. “I’ve—they should have spotted it. I don’t feel right when I’m big and slow and fixed. I mean, they can patch it temporarily but I don’t like that, either, it’s easier just not to be. Only they didn’t even give me a, a—” He’s breathing too fast.

  I feel a stab of anger, not at Sam but at Fiore and the other idiots. “You’ve got a big-body dysphoria, haven’t you?” He nods. “Figures.” Kay spent a whole lifetime as an alien, didn’t she? And kept changing bodies, as if she couldn’t quite settle on a form that she felt comfortable in. Doubtless it’s fixable with therapy, but fixing people’s problems isn’t exactly what this polity is about. “Sam.” I kiss him on the cheek. “We’ve got to get out of here. Where’s your tablet?”

  “Over there.”

  “I need to show you something.” I let go of him and fetch it, intending to point out to him the myriad ways in which the polity constitution turns us into victims of a biologically deterministic tyranny. “Here—” I page through it quickly. “Hey, I didn’t see this before!”

  “What?” He looks over my shoulder.

  “List of revealed behavioral scores. Gender-based. Huh.” I stare. Sex with your partner gets five points for the very first occurrence, dropping off to one point each time after a while. In other words, it’s a decay function. “Adultery,” that bad word, gets minus one hundred. There are some other crazy items. Getting pregnant brings fifty points, bringing the baby to term brings another fifty. What’s abortion? Whatever it is, it gets hammered as hard as adultery, which is what got Esther and Phil into—let’s not go there. There are other things here, the most improbable activities, that get huge penalties. But rape isn’t mentioned. Murder loses you just seventy points. What kind of sense does that make? It’s ludicrous! “Either they’re trying to generate a psychotic polity, or the people in the society they derived these scores from were off their heads.”

  “Or possibly both.” Sam yawns. “Listen, it’s late. We need to get some sleep. Why don’t we go to bed and chew this over tomorrow? With the others?”

  “Yes.” I put the tablet down, not mentioning that tomorrow I’ve got other plans because Fiore is visiting the library again. “Tomorrow is going to be a very interesting day.”

  12

  Bag

  I spend a long time lying in bed awake, fantasizing about what I’d like to do to Mick, about what I think he deserves to have done to him—but which isn’t going to happen. I finally drift into sleep after a particularly brutal fantasy, and I dream again, but this time it’s no nightmare. Rather, it’s a flashback to how I started my life as a tank. I guess these flashbacks would be nightmarish, if they were still invested with any emotional impact—instead they’re grisly and freighted with significance, but drained of immediacy by time and necessity.

  I stay aboard the MASucker Grateful for Duration for almost a gigasecond as it crawls slowly through interstellar space. There’s not really anything else I can do—we’ve been offlined by Curious Yellow, which appears to have targeted the ship for special treatment on the basis of its self-contained systems. Half-crazy with worry for my family, tempered by apprehension about my situation, I check myself into one of the ship’s assemblers when it becomes clear that this isn’t a temporary outage, that something vast and extremely ugly has overcome the Republic of Is and there’s no way around it. We won’t find out what’s happening until the Grateful for Duration reaches its next destination, an obscure religious retreat in orbit around a small and very cold gas giant that orbits a brown dwarf about thirty trillion kilometers away. I extract a promise from Kapitan Vecken that he’ll unserialize me if anything interesting happens, then archive myself to backup storage for the duration.

  When I blink and awaken in the A-gate, the universe has changed around me. I’ve been asleep for a gigasecond while we crawled across almost three Urth-style “light years,” then spent a megasec decelerating under high-gee conditions to a rendezvous with Delta Refuge. The contemplatorian monastery has been erased and filed in deep storage, bits and atoms reconfigured into the sinister angled constructs of a military-industrial complex. Kapitan Vecken is reluctant to lend his ship to the resistance cabal, but he’s happy to run off a clone of his stand-alone A-gate to help speed their botched, jerry-built attempts at constructing a sterile, uninfected nano-ecosystem. And he’s happy to put me ashore. So I meet the resistance.

  At that time—when I first join them—the Linebarger Cats are an informal group of refugees, dissidents, and generally uncooperative alienists who resent any attempt to dictate their conscious phase space. They live in a few cramped habs with little attempt to conceal the artificiality of the environment. In my first few kiloseconds the close-lipped paramilitaries who insist on searching me as I climb out of the transfer pod explain what I’ve missed. The infection is a history worm. It infiltrates A-gates. If you go into an infected A-gate, it crudely deletes chunks of your memory (mostly at random, but if you remember anything from before the Republic of Is, you’re likely to lose it). Then it copies its own kernel into your netlink. There are some bootstrap instructions. If you find an uninfected gate, there’s a compulsion to put it into operator debugging mode, enter commands via the conversational interface, then upload yourself. At which point the A-gate executes the infected boot loader in your netlink, copies it into its working set, and—bang!—another infected gate.

  Assemblers are an old established technology, and for many gigaseconds they’ve been a monoculture, best-of-breed, all using the same subsystems—if you want a new A-gate, you just tell the nearest assembler to clone itself. Where Curious Yellow got started we do not know, but once it was in the wild, it spread like an ideal gas, percolating through the network until it was everywhere.

  It takes a while for a worm to overrun an A-gate network while in stealth mode, using human brains as the infective vector, but once the infection reaches critical mass, it’s virtually impossible to stop it spreading throughout an entire polity.

  Once the activation signal is sent, everything speeds up. Suddenly, there are privileged instruction channels. Infected A-gates sprout defenses, extrude secure netlinks to the nearest T-gates, and start talking to each other directly to exchange orders and information. Here’s the fun thing about Curious Yellow—A-gates that are infected can send each other message packets, peer to peer. If you’ve got the right authentication keys, you can send a distant gate running Curious Yellow instructions to make things. Or modify things. Or change people as they pass through it. It’s an anything box.

  Fearful weapons appear, seemingly at random, engaged on search and destroy missions for who knows what. Someone, somewhere, is writing the macros, and the only way to stay clear is to sever all T-gate connections, shutting the rogue assemblers off from their orders. But the A-gates are still infected, still running Curious Yellow. And if you use them to make more A-gates, those will be infected, too, even if you write complete new design templates—Curious Yellow’s payload incorporates a pattern recognizer for nanoreplicators and inserts itself into anything that looks even remotely similar. The only solution is to drop back to prereplicator tech, use the infected gates to make dumb tools, then try to rebuild a sterile assembler from the wreckage of post-Acceleration technosystems.

  Or you can surrender to Curious Yellow and try to live with the consequences, as the Linebarger Cats explain to me in words of one syllable. Then they ask me what I intend to do, and I ask if I can sign up.

  Which explains how I ended up as a tank, but not really why.

  I wake up as the bright light of dawn crosses the edge of my pillow. I stretch and yawn and look at Sam sleeping beside me, and for a heart-stoppingly tender moment I long to be back on the outside, where I’m Robin and she’s Kay and we’re both properly adjusted humans who can be whoever we want to be and do whatever we want to do. For a moment I wish I’d never fou
nd out who he was . . .

  So I force myself to get out of bed. It’s a library day, and I need to be there because I’ve got at least one customer to deal with—Fiore. I’m tired and apprehensive, wondering in the cold light of day if I’ve blown everything. The idea of going through a normal working cycle after what happened last night feels bizarre, the sort of thing a zombie would do—as if I’m entirely a creature of unconscious habit, obedient to the commands of an unknown puppeteer. But there’s more to it than just doing the job, I remind myself. I’ve got a different goal in mind, something else that the day job is just a cover for. I’m still not entirely sure what’s going on here, why I was sent, and who Yourdon and Fiore are, but enough stuff has surfaced that I can make an educated guess, and the picture I’m piecing together isn’t pretty.

  I’m fairly sure that from the outside YFH-Polity must appear to be a successful social psychology experiment. It’s a closed microcosm community with its own emergent rules and internal dynamics that seem to be eerily close to some of the books I’ve been reading in my spare hours in the library. It’s got to be providing great feedback on dark ages society for Yourdon and Fiore to wave under the noses of the academic oversight committee appointed by the Scholastium. But on the inside of the glasshouse, things are changing very rapidly. When Yourdon and Fiore and the mysterious Hanta announce a continuation, and say that all the inmates have agreed to extend their consent, nobody’s going to look too deeply. By then, the experimental population will have nearly doubled. Half the inmates will be newborn citizens, unknown to the oversight committee on the outside. Maybe it’s even worse than that—I ought to go to the hospital and visit Cass, nose around, and see what their maternity facilities are like. I’ll bet they’re pretty advanced for a dark ages facility. And that they’re expecting plenty of multiple births.

  There’s also the question of the box files in the document repository. I figure they contain about a billion words of data, committed to a storage medium that is stable for tens of gigasecs, potentially even for hundreds. Spores. That’s what they need the babies for, isn’t it? I can’t remember why we don’t have repeated outbreaks of Curious Yellow anymore, it’s one of those memories that’s buried too deeply for me to retrieve. But there’s got to be a connection, hasn’t there? The original Curious Yellow infection spread via human carriers, crudely editing them to insert its kernel code and making them issue debugger commands to load and execute on each assembler they found. It spread via the netlink. Our netlinks don’t work properly, do they? Hmm. The new A-gates are different, but they’re equally a monoculture, just one that’s designed to resist Curious Yellow’s infection strategy. I can’t help thinking about that MilSpec assembler in the library basement. There’s something I’m missing here, something I don’t quite have enough data for—

  I’m dressed for work, standing in the kitchen holding a mug of coffee, and I don’t remember how I got here. For a moment I shudder, in the grip of an anonymous sense of abstract horror. Did I just get dressed, walk downstairs, and make coffee in an introspective haze as I tried to get to grips with the real purpose of this facility? Or is something worse happening? The way I can read the words “I love you” but hear them as “* * *” suggests something’s not quite right in my speech center. If I’m suffering memory dropouts, I could be quite ill. I mean, really ill. The small of my back prickles with cold sweat as I realize that I might be about to unravel like a knit jumper hooked by a nail. I know my memory’s full of gaps where associations between concepts and experiences have been broken, but what if too much has gone? Can the rest of me just disappear spontaneously, speech and memory and perceptions falling victim to an excess of editing?

  Not knowing who you are is even worse than not knowing who you were.

  I get out of the house as fast as I can (leaving Sam asleep upstairs in the bedroom) and walk to work. The weather is as hot as usual—we seem to be moving into a scheduled “summer” season—and I make good time even though I set off in the opposite direction from normal, intending to loop around the back way and come into the downtown district where the library is via a different road.

  I open up the library. It’s neat and tidy—when neither Janis nor I are there I guess there’s probably a zombie janitor on staff duty. I head to the back room to fortify myself with another coffee before Fiore arrives, and as I’m waiting for the kettle to boil I get a surprise.

  “Janis! What are you doing here? I thought you were ill.”

  “I’m feeling a lot better,” she says, summoning up a pale smile. “Last week I was getting sick a lot, and the lower back pain was getting to me, but I’m less nauseous now, and as long as I don’t have to do a lot of bending or lifting, I should be all right for a while. So I thought I’d come in and sit in on the front desk for a bit.”

  Shit. “Well, it’s been very quiet for the past few days,” I tell her. “You don’t have to stay.” A thought strikes me. “You heard about Sunday.”

  “Yes.” Her expression closes up. “I knew something bad was going to happen—Esther and Phil were too indiscreet—but I didn’t expect anything like . . .”

  “Would you like some coffee?” I extemporize, trying to figure out how to get her out of here while I do things that could get me into deep shit if they go wrong.

  “Yes, please.” She’s got that brooding look, now. “I could strangle the greasy little turd.”

  “Fiore’s visiting this morning,” I say, managing to pitch my voice as casually as I can, hoping to get her attention.

  “He is, is he?” She looks at me sharply.

  I lick my lips. “Something else happened last night. I—it would really help if you could do me a favor.”

  “What kind of favor? If it’s about Sunday—”

  “No.” I take a deep breath. “It’s about one of my cohort. Cass. Her husband, Mick, he’s been, uh, well, some of us went round yesterday night, and we took her to the hospital. We’re making sure he doesn’t go anywhere near her, and meanwhile—”

  “Mick. Short guy, big nose, eyes as mad as a very mad thing indeed. That him?”

  “Yes.”

  Janis swears, quietly. “How bad was it?”

  I debate how much to tell her. “It’s about as bad as it can get. If he finds her again, I’m afraid he’ll kill her.” I stare at her. “Janis, Fiore knew. He had to! And he didn’t do anything. I’m half-expecting him to nail us all for a ton of points next Sunday for intervening.”

  She nods thoughtfully. “So what do you want me to do?”

  I switch the kettle off. “Take today off sick, like you have for the past few days. Go to the hospital, visit Cass. If they’ve wired her jaw, she might be able to talk. We can’t be with her all the time, but I think she’ll need someone around. And someone who’ll be there to call the police if Mick shows up. I don’t know if the hospital zombies will do that.”

  “Forget the coffee, I’m out of here.” As she stands up she looks at me oddly. “Good luck with whatever you’re planning for Fiore,” she says. “I hope it’s painful.” Then she heads for the door.

  AFTER Janis leaves, I go and wait behind the front desk. Fiore shows up around midmorning and pointedly ignores me. I offer him a coffee and get a fish-eye stare instead of a “yes”—he seems suspicious. I wonder if it’s because of what happened last night? But he’s here alone, with no police and no tame congregation of score whores to back him up, so he pretends he didn’t see me at all, and I pretend I don’t know anything’s wrong. He heads for the locked door in the reference section, and I manage to hold back the explosive gulp of air my lungs are straining for until he’s gone.

  My hands keep tensing and kneading the handles of my bag as if they belong to someone else. There’s a carving knife in the bag, and I’ve sharpened the blade. It’s not much of a dagger, but I’m betting that Fiore isn’t much of a knife fighter. With any luck he won’t notice anything, or he’ll assume Yourdon is the author of my little modification to the
cellar and, therefore, leave it alone. The knife is for the worst case, if I think Fiore has realized what I’m up to. It’s piss poor compared to the kit I used to work with, but it’s better than nothing. So I sit behind this desk like a prim and proper librarian, entertaining mad fantasies about sawing off the Priest’s head with a carving knife while I wait for him to emerge from the repository.

  Sweat trickles down the small of my back as I look out across the forecourt toward the highway, watching the pattern of light and shade cast by the leaves of the cherry trees on either side of the path shift and recombine on the concrete paving stones. My head hurts as I run through my fragmentary information again. Are my intermittent disconnects hiding things from me that I need to know?

  Riddle me this: Why would three missing renegade psyops specialists from the chaos that followed the fall of the Republic of Is surface inside an experiment re-enacting an historical period about which we know virtually nothing? And why would the filing cupboard at the library contain what looks like a copy of the bytecode to Curious Yellow, printed on paper? Why can’t I hear the spoken words “I love you,” and why am I suffering from intermittent memory blackouts? Why is there a stand-alone A-gate in the basement, and what is Fiore doing with it? And why does Yourdon want us to have lots and lots of babies?

  I don’t know. But there’s one thing I’m absolutely clear about: These scumsuckers used to work for Curious Yellow or one of the cognitive dictatorships, and this is all something to do with the aftermath of the censorship war. I’m here because old-me, the Machiavellian guy with the pen whittled from his own thighbone, harbored deep suspicions along these very lines. But in order to get me in through the YFH firewalls he had to erase the chunks of his memories that would give him away—and those are the very pieces of me that I need in order to understand the situation!