“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.
“Wait sixty seconds. Drive, turning randomly at each intersection, until credit limit exceeded. Avoid obstacles. Confirm?”
“Do it!” I say, then I open the door and pile out into the tunnel mouth with my kit. I wait tensely as the zombie drives off, then I start walking back into the blackness.
The tunnel darkens as it curves, and I pull the big metal flashlight out. Like everything else here, it’s probably not authentic, no electrochemical batteries—the same infrastellar T-gate that powers cars or starships will suffice to provide a trickle of current to a white diode plate. Right now, that’s good news. I shine it at the walls to either side as I walk, until I come to one of the recessed doors. Unlike the last time I came this way, I’m prepared for it. Out comes the hammer drill, and I only spend a few seconds sliding a stone bit into it—all that time in the garage has paid off, I guess. The racket it makes as it bites and chews at the concrete next to the door is deafening, but chunks of synrock fall away, and the air fills with acrid dust that bites at my lungs when I inhale. Should have brought a mask, I realize, but it’s a bit late now, and anyway, the sound and feel of the drill is changing as the bit skitters across bright metal. “Hah!” I mutter, resisting the frantic itch that keeps prodding me to look over my shoulder.
It takes me a couple of minutes to get enough of the surface of the doorframe exposed to be sure what I’m looking at, but the more I see, the happier I am. The concrete tunnel is a hollow tube, and the door is some kind of i
nspection hatch near a join. If I’m right, the join isn’t a T-gate, it’s a physical bulkhead designed to seal segments off in event of a pressure breach, which means this is part of a larger physical structure. This door will lead into the pressure door mechanism, and maybe via an airlock into other adjacent segments—up and down as well as fore and aft, I hope. The only problem is, the door’s locked.
I dig around in my pockets for one of the toys I took from the garage. Chopped-up magnesium from a block the hiking shop sold me, mixed with deliberately rusted iron filings in a candle-wax base—a crude thermite charge. I stick a gobbet of the stuff above the lock mechanism (which is annoyingly anchored in the concrete), flick my lighter under it, then jerk my hand back and turn away fast. Even with my eyelids tightly shut the flare is blindingly intense, leaving purple afterimages of the outline of my arm. There’s a loud hissing sputter, and I wait for a slow count of thirty before I turn round and push hard on the door. It refuses to budge for a moment, then silently gives way. The lock is a glowing hole in the partially exposed doorframe—I hope we don’t have a pressure excursion anytime soon.
I step through the door and glance around. I’m in a small room with some kind of crude-looking machine occupying most of it. Gas bottles, axles, physical valves. It looks as if it was built during the stone age and designed to be maintained using tools from the hardware store. Maybe it was? I scratch my head. If this hab was originally configured for some kind of paleo cult, made to resemble one of the polities of old Urth, it would be relatively easy for Yourdon and Fiore to tailor to their purposes, wouldn’t it? Maybe that’s what old-me meant about this place having unique features suiting it to their needs. There’s a ladder, of all things, bolted to the wall, and a hatch in the floor. I go over to the hatch in the floor, which is secured by a handwheel. Turning the wheel isn’t too hard, and after a moment there’s a faint breeze as the hatch rises and rotates out of the way.
Hmm. There’s a pressure imbalance, but it’s nothing major. That means open doorways, maybe a whole deck down below. But I said I’d go up, didn’t I? I start to climb. The hatch in the ceiling has another wheel, and it takes me longer to rotate it, but there’s some sort of spring mechanism inside it that raises it out of the way. That’s smart design for you. They assume that pressure breaches come from outside, which in a rotating cylinder hab like this means down, so you have to exert force to open a hatch leading down. But hatches leading up have a passive power assist to make it easy to get away from the blowout. I like that philosophy: It’s going to make life ever so much easier.
I climb into the tunnel, then pause to pull my headlamp on. Getting it lit, I climb up above the hatch. Then I step sideways off the ladder and close it behind me. I’m now at the bottom of a dark tunnel occupied only by the ladder, punctuated by shadows far above me, and the trail I’ve left leads down instead of up. I hope there are doors up there. It would be really shitty luck to have gotten this far only to find they’re all jammed or depressurized or something.
13
Climb
BATTALION HQ doesn’t send me direct to Staff. Instead, they put me through an A-gate, and I come out wearing my original ortho body. I feel small and incredibly fragile and alive. It’s an alarming experience that later reminds me of my arrival in YFH-Polity. After my reanimation, they disassemble me and split me into about 224 separate stripes of data and zap it off over quantum-encrypted links via different T-gates. I don’t feel this process, of course. I just get into an A-gate and wake up sitting in another one. But along the way I’ve been fed through a cryptographic remixer circuit, combined and recombined with other data streams with serial numbers filed off, so that even if a couple of the nodes have fallen into enemy hands, they won’t be able to work out where I’m coming from, where I’m going, or who I am.
I blink and come alive again, then open the door of the booth. A tense moment—I’m about to enter the semimythical head office of the Linebarger Cats. A compactly built female xeno with feline features is waiting for me, tapping her claw-tipped fingers. “You’re Robin, aren’t you?” She says. “I love you.”
“I’m sorry, are you sure you’ve got the right person?” I ask.
She bares needle-sharp fangs at me in something approximating a smile: “In your dreams. It’s just a diagnostic test patched into your new netlink—if you can hear the words, it means you’re not carrying a copy of Curious Yellow. Welcome to the crazy camp, Sergeant-Multiple. I’m Captain-Doctor Sanni. Let’s go find an office and I’ll explain what’s going on.”
Sanni is an odd mixture of sly articulacy and shy secretiveness, but she’s read my paper and decided I’m wasted on line ops, and she’s got the clout to make it stick. When she tells me why, I’m inclined to agree. This problem is a whole lot more interesting than blowing holes in defensive perimeters, and much more important in the long term.
“Curious Yellow can be broken,” she explains. “All we have to do is to fracture enough network links that the cost of maintaining internal coherency among the worm farms exceeds their available bandwidth. When that happens, it’ll lose the ability to coordinate its attacks, and we can then defeat it in detail. But the problem is what happens afterward.”
“After.” I shake my head. “You’re already thinking about the postwar situation?”
“Yes. See, Curious Yellow isn’t going to go away. We could replace all the A-gates in human space with another monoculture, and they’ll still be just as prone as the last set to infestation by another coordinated worm attack. And running a polyculture is going to be expensive enough that local monocultures will have a competitive edge . . . In the long run, it’ll evolve back toward a state that is vulnerable to similar infestations. What we need is an architectural solution—one that locks Curious Yellow out by design. The best way to do that is not to eliminate the worm, but to repurpose it.”
“Repurpose it?”
“As an immune system.”
It takes our team, which is one of about fifty groups working under General-Dean Aton, nearly a gigasec to work out the details of that single short sentence and turn it into a weapon. We methodically iterate through hundreds of possibilities, researching the effects on a firewalled experimental network of worm-infested gates before the final working solution is clear, and it takes hundreds of megs to implement and distribute it. But when the main operations group is ready to launch the brutal physical assaults on a thousand network junctions that will ultimately bring down Curious Yellow, the vaccine is waiting for them.
Curious Yellow is a coordinated worm. It accepts instructions from remote nodes. It compares instructions with its neighbors, and if they look right, it executes them—this keeps any single worm-infested gate from being easily subverted. By simultaneously assaulting thousands, we convince them that our new instructions are valid and to be obeyed, and they begin to spread out through the network. The vermifuge is a hacked version of Curious Yellow, equipped with a new payload. It does several tasks that, in combination, should suffice to keep a new infestation down. When humans go through a ’fuged A-gate, the gate installs Sanni’s diagnostic patch in their language centers, while purging any Curious Yellow infection already present. The diagnostic patch is a simple dyslexic loop—if you’re also infested with Curious Yellow you won’t be able to hear the words “I love you.” The final stage of the operation is that once the vermifuge is in place in a wormed gate, it will refuse to accept new instructions broadcast by Curious Yellow’s creators.
We spend a gigasec working all this out and applying it. Tens of thousands of unique soldier-instances die, assaulting hardened positions in order to load copies of the vermifuge into the first gates they capture. Civilian losses are scary, too, millions dying as the embattled and increasingly disconnected Curious Yellow nodes take random defensive measures, and their quislings lash out at their invisible tormentors. But in the end resistance virtually collapses in the space of a single tenday. There’s chaos everywhere, atrocities and
score-settling and panic. There are even some cases of starvation and life-support collapse, where all the assemblers stopped working throughout an entire polity. But we’ve won, and the factional groups in the alliance either disband or become petty governments, starting the long process of rebuilding their little defensible corners of the former megapolity.
The Linebarger Cats mostly go back to their prewar activities, a troupe of historic re-enactment artists in the pay of a retiring metahuman power who has spent the past gigasecs sleeping through the chaos. But not all of us can let go and forget . . .
ONCE upon a time, when I was young and immortal, I jumped off a two-kilometer-high cliff on a partially terraformed moon orbiting a hot Jupiter. There was a fad for self-sustaining biospheres and deep gravity wells and it was selling itself as a resort—that’s my excuse. I did it without a parachute. Gravity was low, about three meters per second squared, but it was still a two-kilometer drop toward a waterfall that obscured the jungle canopy far below with a haze of rainbow fog. I was trying on a mythopoeic body, and as I dropped I spread my wings for the first time, feeling the tension in the enormous thin webs between the fingers of my middle-hands. As experiences go I would heartily recommend it to anyone—right up until the point where an updraft caught my left wing and flipped me tumbling toward a ridge, which I bounced off with a broken finger that folded horribly backward, wrapping me in a caul of my own wingskin as I fell spinning toward my death.
Back at the top of the cliff they insisted on making me watch the last half minute of my life over and over again. I shook my head and went into the A-gate to revert to my orthobody back down at the coffeehouse on the rocky shore beside the lake at the bottom of the waterfall. I stayed there for a long time. I couldn’t stop wondering what it must have been like to be there. The hot dull pain in my mid-hand, the tumbling and whipping chill of the wind, the certainty that I’m going to die—
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