Scratch Monkey

by Charles Stross

  We stop again about a day later, five hundred and eighteen kilometres away if my inertial tracker is still in synch. I look round when the door opens but all I get is a sigh of indrawn-breath. Evidently my transformation is not something they're accustomed to. They shut the door and I hear quite an interesting debate before they open it again to feed me and slop out.

  Finally, a day later – now a thousand kilometres from where I touched down, and I don't flatter myself that they've come all this way just for me – there's a new sound beneath the wheels. Instead of the jounce and sway of the endless dirt tracks there's the hollow booming of a true road, and then we're sliding downhill at a positively reckless speed. I smell smoke through the slats of the floor as the train screeches to a halt outside some kind of checkpoint, and boots patrol slowly down the carriages. Bolts slam home and doors open: many feet pass my refuge.

  The door opens an admits a draft of musty-smelling air. “Alien spy,” says a presence in the doorway; “you will come with us.” I cast about, trying to sense where he is by the rustling of the creases in his uniform.

  “Where?” I ask. “I can't see.”

  “Bloody mess,” says someone else. “Damned butchers couldn't find their brains with a spoon –”

  “– Probably didn't get the orders,” says another voice quietly. “Okay, get her out of there.”

  Two of them get in and untie me from the floor; then they pick me up lightly and carry me to the edge of the door. When they put me down I freeze, listening for movement. It's eerie, like being a child again. Then two of them take me by the arms and lead me slowly into the complex.

  When nobody is taking any notice, I turn my head about. The train has come to a standstill in a vast underground space; I can hear the dank sound of water dripping somewhere distant, the echo of footsteps on slime-encrusted stone or concrete. A cold draft blows down from above, hinting at distant caverns.

  My escorts steer me past walls of metal and wood (other vehicles, perhaps) towards a doorway. Suddenly the sounds from behind are cut off, as if we've entered a tunnel. It's cold in here, and it smells of the bitter rock beneath a mountain; the clack of their boots on the smooth stone floor is the only noise. We come to a guard post where they pause, restraining me, while someone rubs a pole-like device that emits a brief humming noise all over my body. Then we're going down a tunnel, past numerous openings from which blow turbulent currents of air. We make so many turns that even with my inertial tracker I'll never get out of here unaided. We come to a door in the wall, and they push me through it and shut it behind me.

  I freeze, listening carefully. It smells close. There's a lingering odour of stale urine and despair, a miasma of decay that seems to hang in the frigid underground air so that I expect at any moment to put my foot into a nest of mummified bones. I shuffle forwards and carefully stretch my hands out in front of me; I reach the wall unexpectedly soon. It's chilly and rough, hewn from stone blocks. I trace the grooves between them with a fingertip. Strange marks are cut into the surface. Perhaps they're grafitti from long-dead prisoners; it doesn't matter to me. I can't see to read them. Even if I had eyes I probably couldn't read them. The script is as alien as my situation.

  I map out the boundaries of my prison with a growing sense of bleak despair. The floor and ceiling are as rough as the walls, the only difference being that the flagstones are larger; there is no window, and when I work my way back round to the door I run my hands over it. It takes me a few minutes to realise that the bars curve together in the strange geometry of a human rib cage; I am, indeed, in the belly of a beast.

  Presently I sit down and bury my face in my hands. An iron ring digs sharply into my thighs, but I can't be bothered to move. Why should I? I can see no way out; I can see – nothing. And without sight, in this dungeon, I might as well be dead.

  A few hours later the door squeals open. There are two jailers, one of them quite unfit judging by the laboured breathing. They pick me up and lead me into the corridor. I flinch, and they grip my arms tightly as they lead me deeper into the stone tunnels of the catacomb. We must be in a different section now, for the texture of the floor is subtly changed. We walk on mosaics, feet brushing across screaming faces: even the dungeons must be decorative here, in the decaying wreckage of a murdered civilisation. They walk me down a spiral of stone stairs and along more corridors, where I feel the heat of naked flames on my skin.

  “Where are we going?” I ask anxiously, but the guards don't say anything. I'm left to decode the rhythm of their breathing, the long silences that stream away in the echoing darkness. It's the silence of men who know there is nothing more to say. I'm an un-person, and I know what comes next. I wish they'd get it over with.

  We come to doors that block the passage. They clatter as one of the guards fumbles with a key, then they grate open across rough stones very unlike the tiled mosaic my feet have just been walking on.

  “Go forward,” says the guard, “just two paces. Mind the step.” I move hesitantly, shuffle forward and take a step down until I'm standing on a floor of cold, smooth metal that is strangely seamed; then I hear the door shut behind me. My footsteps echo from a bell-like void, so perfect that even the faint rustle of my pyjama-suit returns to my ears. Odd – I keel down and run my fingers along the narrow groove in the floor, just as a band of molten steel seems to clamp itself down around my forehead.

  I scream and collapse, unable even to switch off my pain response; I lie on my back, and it seems to me as I stare sightlessly at the ceiling that I can see a strange, bluish eruption coming at me out of nowhere. It's roughly lenticular in shape, and I quiver with terror as I realise that it and the pain around my head are connected: it triggers strange effects in my damaged nerves. I stare at it as it seems to expand, my eyes twitching sightlessly even as it floods a shimmering glare into my dead visual centre until it fills the universe. My extremities twitch uncontrollably and my head feels like a ripe fruit beneath an axe – then, as suddenly as it began, the pain vanishes.

  I wish they'd simply hanged me, because this is an order of magnitude worse. Big electromagnets, or something similar embedded in the wall of the chamber, zapped my upload transceivers, deranging the nanotech implants that are needed to upload my identity into the Dreamtime when I die. My basic controls are still responding, but the deep structures – the important stuff – is gone. If they kill me now, Distant Intervention won't be able to restore my personality. This is a kind of death I've never expected. I've bitten my cheek again and I roll over. Then I stand up, slowly. I'm not alone.

  “Bravo!” calls a loud voice from the other side of the domed room. “An astonishing performance! Such immediacy, such feeling!” A pair of hands claps, shockingly. I carefully turn around, listening for the noise of the other persons breathing.

  “Who is it?” I call. There's someone there, but I can't tell how far away they are.

  “Who do you think?”

  I guess. “Not Marat Hree?” I ask unsteadily. “Come to do the honours in person?”

  She laughs again, humourlessly. “Don't honour yourself. You're very tenacious, you know. I've survived local assassins before, but if you're typical of the variety Distant Intervention sends – “ again, I feel a caress of molten steel around my forehead, but it relaxes before I can flinch at the anticipated agony – “please remember that I have integral defences. I can kill you with a thought.”

  I nod, too resigned to feel terror. “Why am I still alive?” I ask.

  She steps into the room and I listen carefully. There's a swish of fabric across the metal floor; light silk or cotton, perhaps. There's a noise of hair brushing on her collar, the creak of sandals flexing slightly as she walks – I turn my entire anatomy into an ear, listening to the roaring sounds of silence.

  “I want you to carry a message,” she says. “That's why you're alive. Need I say any more?” Her voice is warm, intimate, and chillingly detached from reality.

  I think, briefly. “No,”
I say. “Is that thing up there designed to fry nanocircuitry?”

  “Yes,” she says. “It's one of several I brought with me. I lifted the design from a badly secured system out near Beta Lyrae Internode.” She laughs musically and stretches – I can hear her arms sliding in her sleeves. I can hear everything; terror hones my senses to a knife-edge. “Can you guess what I am?”

  My mouth goes dry. “Yes,” I say. “You're not a native, are you? You found a way to break their quarantine. For your own reasons.” I stay where I am, rooted to the spot, as she walks towards the geometric centre of the room, where all the echoes converge.

  “More or less,” she says. “How could they ever expect to succeed on their own terms, with the threat of the Dreamtime's owners hanging over them? If you understand what this is really about ... working for them is not the greatest of your crimes, but it's probably the most pernicious.” Her voice sounds as if she ought to be frowning. “I'm not going to kill you, but I would like it if you would accompany me, and talk.”

  I swallow. She walks closer to me and I catch a faint impression of scent; she uses something rough and heady, something wild that hints at the darkness she walks in. The thing is, everything around her is dark, even at noon; none of her victims can ever see what she does to them because she works under the shadow of blindness. Like a spider lurking in a web at the end of a tunnel. “Your followers flash-burned my eyes,” I say. “I can't see where I'm going.”

  She laughs again and claps her hands. “Very well,” she says. “Place your trust in me ...”

  I feel my legs begin to move without my willing them; her integral defence system is interfacing with what's left of my peripheral nanotechs and driving my body by remote control. I jitter on the edge of panic for a moment until I realise that I can shut off any peripheral nerve trunk in my body – I can play a neural shell game with her if I have to. My legs are weak with a fear that I don't let myself acknowledge: the body knows what the mind denies.

  A dry hand slips itself over my wrist, and I try not to flinch away. My arm is as sensitive to her touch as to a lover's. Her skin is dehydrated, as if all the blood she's shed has come from her own body, leaving her a creature of ashes and salt. I think she's prematurely aged – or her intensity is eating her up at least as fast as she is using it. “Come this way,” she says, oppressively close to my ear. “I'll tell you what I want you to do when I send you back. I wish those fools in intelligence had picked you up earlier.”

  “Why?” I ask. “Why should I?”

  She sighs. “I would have thought it was obvious. These people never asked to be farmed by your superbrights! I'm going to free them. This current generation is damned – the nanotech uploaders are pervasive – but if I can raise the children, cleansed at birth ...”

  “How?” I ask; “I mean, why are you doing this?”

  She lets go of my hand. I feel a breeze as the door opens; we're standing in a tunnel, I decide, or a lift shaft. “For love of the people,” she says quietly. “The afterlife your sponsors claim to protect is a cruel lie. I come to free them from the cannibal tyranny of those who eat minds. If you don't believe me, go ask your masters. They aren't human, and their agenda is inhuman. Or did you think people were still afraid of death and upload for nothing? Step forward now.” I obey, stumbling slightly on the edge, and she's behind me: the door closes and we begin to rise.

  We ascend for an eternity, and then the lift stops. I hear the door open, and then another set of doors open; “step forward another three paces,” she says.

  I do what she wants and almost walk into a railing. I can feel a steady breeze, the warm glow of sunlight on the skin of my face, a cool metal rail beneath my hands. The stones beneath my bare feet are warmed by the invisible sun. “Steady now,” she says. “You're looking out across my personal spaceport. There are two shuttles on the field; my resource base is in deep orbit, where it can out-build your weapons systems before you can find it. Your Superbrights masters would never let us live in peace, you see,” she says; “it's not in their interests to let human beings learn the truth about the Dreamtime. So I had to either go outside the Dreamtime, beyond all human settlement, or destabilize it locally to disrupt their feeding patterns. The former was impossible, but the latter ... all it takes is a little leverage...”

  “That's it!” I say. “You're blinding and killing people in bulk, to overload the local Dreamtime substrate. Is that true? So that eventually their children can live without hope of an afterlife, of a second chance when this life is over? You blind and kill how many people a day?”

  I can hear birds singing in the distance. I realise that I may never hear them again. I'm probably grinning like a corpse but I don't care – she must know by now that blind people often smile. It's easier to grin than to frown; the facial muscles contract into a smirk more easily. Even when you're about to die.

  “It takes a lot of stress to unbalance a network processor the size of a small moon,” she replies calmly; “it shows a remarkable degree of fault tolerance. As for physical assault, the automatic defences are still armed ... as they always have been. So If we want to take it for ourselves, we must overwhelm it by frontal assault, sending uploaded minds out into the simulation space until it overloads and drops into NP-stasis. They do that if you feed them faster than they can transfer capacity elsewhere, you know. It's happened before, and it's what the Superbrights are most afraid of. A Dreamtime they lose contact with means a human world that will not succumb to their domination again. Only then will we be safe. The superbrights need uploaded minds, you see. Their intelligence needs so much input that they consume human personalities or they go insane from memetic deprivation. Overloading the Dreamtime ... you wouldn't believe how many of them it takes.” She falls silent for a moment, and I focus on the sound of her breathing. It's noisy – perhaps a touch of asthma in this tropical climate? I hear, again, the rustle of her garment as she turns her head towards me.

  “But what have the superbrights done to you?” I ask, not quite believing that I can talk. I feel dizzy. Weak, too. She's completely crazy but there's a power in her voice that overwhelms me, driving me mad with something like a lust for blood. “All they do is stabilize the Dreamtime for everybody's benefit.”

  “If only you'd listen ...” she stops. I hear her swallow. Deep emotion; I've hit some kind of sensitive spot. She believes what she's saying, however warped and mad it sounds. If I had nothing worse to fear it would give me pause for thought. What if there's a germ of truth in it? “It's for their own benefit. They eat human minds! Like demons! – but everything they've taught you contradicts that. They're benefactors, to you. You look after their interests, which superficially look beneficient. But they aren't, not really. If you don't believe me, ask your owner! We know the truth –”

  She pauses. The manic urgency leaves her voice. She continues: “I want you to take a message to your controller in Distant Intervention. I don't intend to take action against the rest of the Dreamtime network, but they must recognise that we do not want the Dreamtime here in this system.” She pauses for effect. “Either you shut down the local expansion processor, or ... I have lots of weapons left.”

  “That is the total content of your message?” I ask. I can feel the fresh wind blowing across my face; I think I'm high above the ground, looking out from a balcony in the turret of a castle ... but I can't tell for sure. That's the curse of blindness, the uncertainty. I'm locked into my childhood hell; all I can do to resist is to try to revert to the time when my entire body was an ear, to the time when the noise of sunlight falling on water was as loud as thunder. I feel as if I should be weaker, smaller, than I am. I have my ears, I tell myself.

  “Yes,” she says. “That's what I want from you. This attempt to assassinate me is futile – why can't the Superbrights just leave us alone? We represent no threat! They don't have to prey on us. They can eat dreams as well as minds.” There's anger in her voice, and a sense of churning menace that m
akes my blood run cold; I don't doubt that if she wanted to she could blot out my consciousness like a gnat. “I am loyal to my species,” she insists, almost petulantly. “It's your freedom I'm fighting for! The superbrights – they treat us like animals! Without the freedom to suffer and die, what are we?”

  “How do you know they eat us?” I ask. “The network is expanding. New worlds are added. Uploads could just be being shunted over the local event horizon, to even up the load on new processor sites. Colonizing space –”

  “They're not,” she says dogmatically. “That's a lie the Superbrights promote for their own purposes. Do you really think they'd tell you the truth if they knew it would make you question their motives?”

  “I don't know,” I say diplomatically, biting back the rage building up inside me. “Maybe we need to live on the edge of existence in order to prove to ourselves that we exist; maybe – “ I shrug, unable to express what I'm feeling. They gave me eyes again, and you took them away. My guts are burning now. I know what I've got to do: I'm tense with anticipation.

  “Come, then,” she says. “I'll put you on board one of the shuttles. Then you can rendezvous with your station and give them my message. It's not such a terrible thing, is it?”

  She guides me back towards the lift, not bothering to warn me that she's taking control of my legs again.