Glasshouse

by Charles Stross

  “Reeve?” prompts Janis.

  “Okay, here’s the frame: We’re on a MASucker that somehow got de-crewed during the censorship wars. At a guess, CY broke out during a scheduled crew shift change or something. Anyway, the polity we’re in is actually a quilted patchwork of sectors spliced together by shortjump gates in all those road tunnels, but they’re all in a single physical manifold aboard one ship rather than scattered across separate habs. That’s why it was possible to turn it into a prison. There’s only one longjump gate in or out of the MASucker, and it’s stashed at one end of an armored pod on the outside of the hull with a shortjump gate at the other end of the tunnel—this is standard MASucker security, you understand. Someone outside could throw a nuke through at the ship and it would be expended outside the hull. Anyway, we first need to take and hold the shortjump gate leading to the longjump pod, then we need to trash the longjump pod.

  “We need to sever communications between us and their base of operations in the surgeon-confessors’ hall, then make sure everybody knows. Yourdon and Fiore have gotten away with running this existential dictatorship unopposed because they’ve got a sufficient proportion of us convinced that we’re in line for a payback if we play along. Hanta gives them an ace in their hole. They don’t need to worry about the payback; eventually she’ll have time to just adjust everyone who drifts out of line. Once we’re cut off from the outside, the cabal lose their backup and their social leverage, and we’ve got a straight fight. But if we don’t succeed, they can just block the gates between parish sectors and mop us up in detail, one sector at a time.”

  I pause to lick my lips. “I spent some time on a MASucker before the war. The door to the longjump pod was stashed near the bridge, uh, the administrative block—which would correspond to either the cathedral or City Hall in the new structure Yourdon is assembling. I did some snooping around last week, and I found where Yourdon lives. He’s got a suite up on the top floor of City Hall, with security up to the eyeballs—I didn’t get in, but I poked around the lower levels—and it turns out that City Hall bears a remarkable resemblance to the Captain’s Lodge on the MASucker I was aboard. In which case, the T-gate to the longjump pod will be on the top floor, in a secure suite adjacent to the captain’s quarters.”

  I stop.

  Janis stands up. “There you’ve got it, folks, so let’s keep this simple. We all have invitations to the ceremony at City Hall the day after tomorrow. I propose that we go there. I’ve had the fab here”—she waves at the assembler—“turning out kits with shielded bags so you can carry them away without fear of surveillance. Reeve?”

  I clear my throat. “Plan is, we take our kit along and cut loose as soon as Yourdon steps up to the front to address everyone. Team Green’s job is to secure the hall, drop any armed support the bad guys have, and kill as many copies of Yourdon, Fiore, and Hanta as we can find. They’ll have backups or multiples running live, but if we do everything fast, we can stop the instances in City Hall getting word out. Meanwhile, Team Yellow will go up to the captain’s—the Bishop’s—quarters and blow the longjump pod right off the side of the ship. Any questions?”

  Hands go up.

  “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. El, Bernice, Helen, Priss, Morgaine, Jill, you’re all on Team Green with Janis, who’s in overall charge. Sam, Greg, Martin, and Liz are Team Yellow with me. I’m in charge. Team Yellow, hang around, and I’ll brief you. Team Green, eat your lunch, then go back to work—come back to the library individually this afternoon or tomorrow, and Janis will sort you out, back you up, and brief you.”

  There’s more muttering from the back. Janis clears her throat. “One more thing. Operational security is paramount. If anyone says anything, we are all . . . not dead. Worse. Dr. Hanta has a full-capability brainfuck clinic running in the hospital. If you give any sign outside of this basement that you’re involved in this plan, they’ll shut down the shortjump gates, isolating you, and flood us with zombies until we run out of bullets and knives. Then they’ll cart us away and turn us into happy, smiling slaves. Some of you may figure that’s better than dying—all right, that’s your personal choice. But if I think any of you is going to try to impose that choice on me by going to the priests, you will find that my personal choice is to shoot you dead first.

  “If you don’t want to be in on this, say so right now—or hang around upstairs and tell me when everyone else has gone. We’ve got an A-gate; we can just back you up and keep you on ice for the duration. There’s no reason to be part of this if you’re frightened. But if you don’t explicitly opt out, then you’re accepting my command, and I will expect total obedience on pain of death, until we’ve secured the ship.”

  Janis looks round at everyone, and her expression is harsh. For a moment Sanni is back, shining through her skin like a bright lamp through camouflage netting, frightening and feral. “Do you all understand?”

  There’s a chorus of yesses from around the room. Then one of the pregnant women at the back pipes up. “What are we waiting for? Let’s roll!”

  TIME rushes by, counting down to a point of tension that lies ahead.

  We’ve got logistic problems. Having the A-gate in the library basement is wonderful—it’s almost indispensable to what we’re attempting to do—but there are limits on what it can churn out. No rare isotopes, so we can’t simply nuke the longjump pod. Nor do we have the design templates for a tankbody or combat drones or much of anything beyond personal sidearms. You can’t manufacture T-gates in an A-gate, so we’ve got to work without wormhole tech—that rules out Vorpal blades. Given time or immunity from surveillance we could probably work around those restrictions, but Janis says we’ve got a maximum feedstock mass flow of a hundred kilograms per hour. I suspect Fiore, or whoever decided to plant this thing in the library basement, throttled it deliberately to stop someone like me from turning it into an invasion platform. Their operational security is patchy after the manner of many overhasty and understaffed projects, but it’s far from nonexistent.

  In the end Janis tells me, “I’m going to leave it on overnight, building a brick of plasticized RDX along with detonators and some extra gun cartridges. We can put together about ten kilos over a six-hour run. That much high explosive is probably about as much energy as we can risk sucking without triggering an alarm somewhere. Do you think you can do the job on the longjump gate frame with that much?”

  “Ten kilos?” I shake my head. “That’s disappointing. That’s really not good.”

  She shrugs. “You want to risk going technical on Yourdon, be my guest.”

  She’s got a point. There’s a very good chance that the bad guys will have planted trojans in some of the design templates for more complex weapons—anything much more sophisticated than handguns and raw chemical explosive will have interlocks and sensor systems that might slip past our vetting. The machine pistols she’s run up are crude things, iron sights and mechanical triggers and no heads-up capability. They don’t even have biometric interlocks to stop someone taking your own gun and shooting you with it. They’re a step up from my crossbow project, but not a very high step. On the other hand, they’ve got no telltale electronics that Yourdon or Fiore might subvert.

  “Did you test the gun cartridges? Just in case?”

  Janis nods. “Thunder stick go bang. No fear on that account.”

  “Well, at least something’s going to work, then.” I’d be happier if we could lay in a brace of stunguns, but since I’m not wearing Fiore anymore, that would be kind of difficult to arrange.

  Janis looks at me. “Make or break time.”

  I breathe deeply. “When has it been any other way?”

  “Ah, but. We had backups, didn’t we?” Her shoulders are set defensively. “This time it’s our last show. It isn’t how I expected things to turn out.”

  “Me neither.” I finish packing my bag and straighten up. “Do you think anyone will crack?”

  “I hope not.” She stares at the wall, eyes f
ocused on some inner space. “I hope not.” Her hand goes to her belly again. “There’s a reason I recruited gravid females. It does things to your outlook. I’ve learned that much.” Her eyes glisten. “It can go either way—peeps who’re still role-playing their way through YFH in their head get angry and frightened, and those who’ve internalized it, who’re getting ready to be mothers, get even angrier about what those brainfuckers are going to do to their children. Once you get through the fear and disbelief, you get to the anger. I don’t think any of the pregnant females will crack, and you’ll notice the males who were along all have partners who are involved.”

  “True.” Janis—no, Sanni—is sharp as a knife. She knows what she’s doing when it comes to organizing a covert operation cell. But if she’s a knife, she’s one with a brittle edge. “Sanni, can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.” Her tone is relaxed but I see the little signs of tension, the wrinkles around her eyes. She knows why I used that name.

  “What do you want to do after this?” I grasp for the right words: “We’re about to lock ourselves down in this little bubble-polity like something out of the stone age, a generation ship . . . we’re not going to be getting out of here for gigasecs, tens of gigs, at a minimum! I mean, not unless we go into suspension afterward. And I thought you, you’d be wanting to escape, to get out and warn everybody off. Break YFH from the outside. Instead, well, we’ve come up with a case for pulling down the escape tunnel on top of ourselves. What do you want to do afterward once we’ve cut ourselves off?”

  Sanni looks at me as if I’ve sprouted a second head. “I want to retire.” She glances round at the basement nervously. “This place is giving me the creeps; we ought to go home soon. Look, Reeve—Robin—this is where we belong. This is the glasshouse. It’s where they sent the damaged ones after the war. The ones who need reprogramming, rehabilitation. Yourdon and Hanta and Fiore belong here—but don’t you think maybe we belong here, too?” She looks haunted.

  I think for a minute. “No, I don’t think so.” Then I force myself to add, “But I think I could grow to like it here if only we weren’t under pressure from . . . them.”

  “That’s what it was designed for. A rest home, a seductive retirement, balm for the tortured brow. Go on home to Sam.” She walks toward the stairs without looking at me. “Think about what you’ve done, or what he did. I’ve got blood on my hands, and I know it.” She’s halfway up the stairs, and I have to move to keep up with her. “Don’t you think that the world outside ought to be protected from people like us?”

  At the top of the staircase I think of a reply. “Perhaps. And perhaps you’re right, we did terrible things. But there was a war on, and it was necessary.”

  She takes a deep breath. “I wish I had your self-confidence.”

  I blink at her. My self-confidence? Until I found her frightened and alone here, I’d always thought Sanni was the confident one. But now the other conspirators have gone, she looks confused and a bit lost. “I can’t afford doubts,” I admit. “Because if I start doubting, I’ll probably fall apart.”

  She produces a radiant smile, like first light over a test range. “Don’t do that, Robin. I’m counting on you. You’re all the army I need.”

  “Okay,” I say. And then we go our separate ways.

  I walk home, my mesh-lined bag slung over one shoulder. Today is not a day for a taxi ride, especially now that there’s some risk of running into Ike. Everything seems particularly vivid for some reason, the grass greener and the sky bluer, and the scent of the flower beds outside the municipal buildings overwhelmingly sweet and strange. My skin feels as if I’ve picked up a massive electrostatic charge, hair follicles standing erect. I am alive, I realize. By this time tomorrow I might be dead, dead and gone forever because if we fail, the YFH cabal will still have the T-gate, and their coconspirators won’t hesitate to delete whatever copies of us they have on file. I might be part of history, dry as dust, an object of study if there ever is another generation of historians.

  And if do somehow manage to survive, I’ll be a prisoner here for the next three unenhanced lifetimes.

  I have mixed emotions. When I went into combat before—what I remember of it—I didn’t worry about dying. But I wasn’t human, then. I was a regiment of tanks. The only way I could die would be if our side lost the entire war.

  But I’ve got Sam, now. The thought of Sam’s being in danger makes me cringe. The thought of both of us being at the mercy of the YFH cabal makes me a different kind of uneasy. Bend the neck, surrender, and it will be fine: That’s the echo of her personal choice coming back to haunt me. I rejected her, didn’t I? But she’s part of me. Indivisible, inescapable. I can never escape from the knowledge that I surrendered—

  Sanni has surrendered, I realize. Not to Yourdon and Fiore, but to the end of the war. She doesn’t want to fight anymore; she wants to settle down and raise a family and be a small-town librarian. Janis is the real Sanni now, as real as she gets. The glasshouse may have been subverted and perverted by the plotters, but it’s still working its psychological alchemy on us. Maybe that’s what Sanni was talking about. We’re none of us who or what we used to be, although our history remains indelible. I try to imagine what I must have looked like to the civilians aboard the habs we conquered through coup de main, and I find a blind spot. I know I must have terrified them, but inside the armor and behind the guns I was just me, wasn’t I? But how were they to know? No matter. It’s over, now. I’ve got to live with it, just the way we had to do it. It seemed necessary at the time: If you didn’t want your memories to be censored by feral software, or worse, by unscrupulous opportunists who’d trojaned the worm, you had to fight. And once you take the decision to fight, you have to live with the consequences. That’s the difference between us and Yourdon, Fiore, and Hanta. We’re willing to harbor doubts, to let go; but they’re still fighting to bring the war back to their enemies. To us.

  These aren’t good thoughts to be thinking. They’re downright morbid, and I can live without them—but they won’t leave me alone, so as I walk I try to fight back by swinging my bag and whistling a jolly tune. And I try to look at myself from the outside as I go. Here’s a jolly librarian, outwardly a young woman in a summer dress, shoulder bag in hand, whistling as she walks home from a day at work. Invert the picture, though, and you see a dream-haunted ex-soldier, clutching a kitbag containing a machine pistol, slinking back to her billet for a final time before the—

  Look, just stop, why don’t you?

  That’s better.

  When I get home, I stash the bag in the kitchen. The TV is going in the living room, so I shed my shoes and pad through.

  “Sam.”

  He’s on the sofa, curled up opposite the flickering screen as usual. He’s holding a metal canister of beer. He glances at me as I come in.

  “Sam.” I join him on the sofa. After a moment I realize that he’s not really watching the TV. Instead, his eyes are on the patio outside the glass doors at the end of the room. He breathes slowly, evenly, his chest rising and falling steadily. “Sam.”

  His eyes flicker toward me, and a moment later the corners of his mouth edge upward. “Been working late?”

  “I walked.” I pull my feet up. The soft cushions of the sofa swallow them. I lean sideways against him, letting my head fall against his shoulder. “I wanted to feel . . .”

  “Connected.”

  “Yes, that’s it, exactly.” I can feel his pulse, and his breathing is profound, a stirring in the roots of my world. “I missed you.”

  “I missed you, too.” A hand touches my cheek, moves up to brush hair back from my forehead.

  At moments like this I hate being an unreconstructed human—an island of thinking jelly trapped in a bony carapace, endless milliseconds away from its lovers, forced to squeeze every meaning through a low-bandwidth speech channel. All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night. If I were half of who I used to be,
and had my resources to hand—and if Sam, if Kay, wanted to—we could multiplex, and know each other a thousand times as deeply as this awkward serial humanity permits. There’s a poignancy to knowing what we’ve lost, what we might have had together, which only makes me want him more strongly. I move uneasily and clutch at his waist. “What took you so long?”

  “I’m running away.” He finally turns his head to look at me sidelong. “From myself.”

  “Me too,” Throwing caution to the wind: “Is that part of your problem? With being . . . this?”

  “It’s too close.” He swallows. “To what they wanted me to be.”

  I don’t ask who “they” were. “Do you want to escape? To leave the polity?”

  He’s silent for a long while. “I don’t think so,” he says eventually. “Because I’d have to go back to being what I want not to be, if that makes sense to you. Kay was a disguise, Reeve, a mask. A hollow woman. Not a real person.”

  I snuggle closer to him. “I know you wanted to grow into her.”

  “Do you?” He raises an eyebrow.

  “Look, why do you think I’m here?”

  “Point.” He looks momentarily rueful. “Do you want to leave?”

  We’re not really talking about staying or leaving, this is understood, but what he really means by that—“I thought I did,” I admit, toying with the buttons on the front of his shirt. “Then Dr. Hanta sorted me out, and I realized that what I really wanted was somewhere to heal, somewhere to be me. Community. Peace.” I get my hand inside his shirt, and his breath acquires a little hoarse edge that makes me squeeze my thighs together. “Love.” I pause. “Not necessarily her way, mind you.” His hand is stroking my hair. His other hand—“Do that some more.”

  “I’m afraid, Reeve.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  Later: “I want what you described.”