I wondered if I’d ever find out.
It happened a long time ago. Since then, hair-raising topological exploits with the Linebarger Cats—not to mention age and cynicism—have shown me how the way we warp and twist space-time has impaired our ability to comprehend the structures we inhabit. Architecture has always influenced or controlled social organization, but in a polity connected by T-gates, it has become more than influential—architects have become our dictators.
The vast majority of us live in the frigid depths of space, in spinning cylinders of archaic design that orbit brown dwarf stars or the outer gas giants of solar systems in which no world remotely like long-dismantled Urth could ever form. For the most part we pay no attention to the underpinnings of our human-habitable spaces, save when they inconvenience us and we need to repair or replace them. They’re the empty stages upon which we parade the finery of our many-roomed mansions, interlaced by holes in space that annul the significance of the dark light years between . . .
. . . Until you try to climb one of the emergency maintenance shafts. Then you know about it.
The ladder rungs are anchored to the antispinward wall of the shaft, rising toward the infinity of darkness that swallows my flashlight beam whenever I look up. Below me there’s a long drop to a floor as unforgiving as the rocks at the foot of that waterfall. I climb steadily, pacing myself. The radius of curvature of the hab segments in YFH-Polity is small enough that if this is a single cylinder, it must be several kilometers in diameter. The roof of our hab is too high to touch from on top of a four-story building—the tallest structures in downtown—but I’m already far above that, with no sign of any openings.
At two hundred rungs I stop and rest. My arms are already feeling sore, muscles complaining. If I hadn’t been working out for weeks, I’d be half-dead by now. I have no way of knowing how much farther I’ll have to climb, and a dull worry gnaws at my stomach. What if I’m wrong? I’m assuming YFH-Polity is what it appears to be—a bunch of hab sectors spliced together with T-gates, interleaved among other self-contained polity segments across a multiplicity of real-space habitats. But what if they’ve gone further than simply blocking access to the rest of the network? It used to be the glasshouse, after all. What if my embedded passenger got it critically wrong, and we’re actually stranded in a single location? There might be no way out.
But I can’t go back. Yourdon must have figured out I’m on the loose by now. He’ll mobilize the zombies and hunt me down like a rat cornered by army ants. Sam will be alone, wondering what happened, getting lonelier and crazier and more depressed. Sooner or later Mick will get his hands on Cass again. Jen will continue to play her malignant head games with Alice and Angel. Fiore will slowly turn the entire community into festering hate-filled puppets dancing to the tune of a dark ages culture based on insecurity and fear. And I’m fairly certain I know what their game is.
This isn’t an archaeology experiment, it’s a psychological warfare laboratory. They’re testing out their design for an emergent behaviorally controlled society. YFH-Polity is a prototype for the next generation of cognitive dictatorship. Because, when they surface to release their new and improved version of Curious Yellow upon an unsuspecting net, it won’t be to install a crude censorship regime. The payload they’re planning will subtly impose behavioral rules on its victims, and the resulting emergent society will be one designed for their exploitation. A future of Church every Sunday, sword and chalice on the altar, a pervert in every pulpit preaching betrayal and distrust. Score whores in your neighborhood twitching panopticon curtains to enforce an existential fascism—and that’s just the beginning. If the population of unvaccinated loyal carriers that Yourdon and Fiore are breeding up are destined to be carriers of the next release of Curious Yellow, the whole of human space will end up looking like a bunch of postop cases from the surgeon-confessor’s clinic.
I can’t afford to fail.
Minutes trickle away in silence before I start moving again, putting one hand above the other, then one foot, then the next hand, then the next foot. Repeat five times, then rest five beats. Repeat five times, then rest five beats makes ten. Repeat that another nine times, and I’m a hundred rungs farther up this tube of torments. Morbid thoughts plague me. I could hit a patch of grease and slip. Or just . . . not reach the top. The rungs are about twenty centimeters apart. I’m nearing five hundred, now, a hundred meters straight up. I’d hit the bottom so fast I’d splash. (Banging off the ladder on the way down, of course, gently drifting in the grip of Coriolis force. If I’d remembered to bring a plumb bob and a long enough string, I could figure out roughly how large this hab cylinder is, but I didn’t think that far ahead.) My shoulders and elbows ache like they’re in a vise. I’ve spent ages pulling and pushing on that stupid weight machine in the basement, but there’s a difference between a half-hour workout and hanging on for life. If I have another memory fugue, I’m toast. How high can I go? How far apart are the inhabitable decks? If I’m unlucky, it could be kilometers—
I can’t fail; I owe it to what Lauro, Iambic-18, and Neual used to mean to me not to let this happen. If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.
Six hundred rungs and my arms are shrieking for mercy. My thigh muscles aren’t too happy, either. I’m gritting my teeth and hoping for mercy when I see a shadow above me. I stop and pant for a while, studying the outline. Rectangular, set into the wall. Could it be? I resume climbing, doggedly putting one hand in front of the other until I get there, close to nine hundred rungs up.
The shadow turns out to be the entrance to a short human-height tunnel leading away from beside the ladder. It runs two meters into the wall, then there’s a thick, curved pressure door with another handwheel set in it. I’m there! I’d dance for joy except my arms feel as if they’d fall off. I step into the tunnel and switch my big flashlight to candle mode, then sit down and lean back against the wall and close my eyes for a count of a hundred. I think I’ve earned it. Besides, I don’t know what’ll be waiting on the other side of the door.
My arms feel like rubber, but I don’t dare hang around. After a couple of minutes I force myself to my feet and inspect the handwheel. It looks workable, but when I try to turn it, it won’t budge. “Shit,” I mutter aloud. These are desperate straits. Maybe if I had a lever, I think, then I remember the flashlight. It’s a big aluminum bar with a light at one end. I stick it through the spokes of the wheel and lean my weight on it, pushing against the wall, putting everything I’ve got into trying to make the thing turn.
After a couple of minutes I admit to myself that the wheel is not going to budge. It occurs to me that the builders of this hab were hot on fail-safes—what if it isn’t turning because there’s hard vacuum on the other side? Either it’s got a deadlock triggered by too high a pressure differential, or it’s just been in vacuum for so long that it’s welded shut. “Shit,” I mutter again. This could be another of Yourdon and Fiore’s half-assed security measures. What good does it do me to get into an access tunnel if the other floors are all open to space? Assuming they know about these access tunnels in the first place, of course.
I wipe the sweat from my face and lean against the wall. “Up or down?” I ask aloud, but nobody’s answering. Down, at least there’s another level with air. Up, and . . . well, there might be nothing. Or there might be a whole damn orbital habitat that the bad guys don’t know about. I could step out into a city boulevard in Old Paradys, or the back of a brasserie in Zhang Li. If I get lucky. If I’m not just imagining those places.
I stow the big flashlight in my belt loop and head back toward the ladder. If I don’t get somewhere in another thousand rungs, I’m going to have to rethink my escape plan. Two thousand rungs total will be nearly half a kilometer. If I’d realized I was in for something like this, I would have bought climbing equipment, a winch, even a rope I could sling around myself so I could rest on the ladder. I fantasize briefly about rocket packs and elev
ator cars. Then I grab the next rung and begin to climb again.
Another nine hundred rungs up the ladder I become half-certain that I’m going to die. My arms are screaming at me, and my left thigh has started threatening to cramp. I pause for breath, my heart hammering. It’s like being on the cliff again. This hab has got to be kilometers in radius—the gravity here feels about the same as it did when I started out. I’m in a tube with Urth-standard gee, air: terminal velocity will be about eighty meters per second. If I were to let go, the Coriolis force would rub me against the ladder like a cheese grater at two hundred kilometers per hour, leaving a greasy red smear. I can keep climbing, sure, but how easy is it going to be to climb back down if I keep going up until I’m exhausted? Thinking about it, I’m not sure going down is any better than going up. Less lifting, but still flexing a left elbow that feels about twice the size it should be, hot and throbbing as I raise it—
There’s another platform ahead. Twenty rungs up. Roughly four hundred meters from the bottom. “What?” I’m talking to myself—that’s not good news. I raise my right hand. Yes, it’s a platform.
The next thing I know, I’m sitting on the platform, my legs dangling over the abyss, and I have no clear recollection of how I got here. I must have had another fugue moment. I shudder, my blood running cold at the realization.
I look round. This platform is just like the last one, right down to the door with the handwheel set in it two meters up the tunnel. Which means either I’m shit out of luck, or—well, I can try the door, at least. If it doesn’t work, I can rest up. Then it’s either up or down, heads or tails. I really don’t think I can make another climb until my abused muscles have had some time to recover, and I didn’t bring water or food. So I guess it’s down, and down and down and back into the depths of Yourdon’s little totalitarian fantasy.
Unless I let go of the ladder.
Or the door opens.
I take a kilosecond to rest up before I approach the door. When I spin the wheel one-handed, it smoothly winds up momentum, then there’s a sigh of long-seated gaskets as it pulls away from the frame and swings out to one side. I look through the opening and see a universe that doesn’t make any kind of sense to my eyes.
The floor in front of the doorway is flat, slightly rough, with a grayish stippled regularity typical of a high-grip paving system. The segments are Penrose tiles, presumably laid out by a walking assembler that crawled across the inner surface of this gigantic cylindrical space, never recrossing its own path as it vomited out the floor. Above my head there’s a grayish ceiling that curves in the far distance to meet the upturned bowl of the horizon. Fine needles of diamond stab from the floor to the roof, holding heaven and earth apart. The door I’ve just stepped out of is set in the base of one of the needles—they’re huge, and they’re a long way apart.
This is probably an interdeck, an interstitial support space between the inhabited floors. Or it’s a deck that hasn’t been linked into the manifold of T-gates, terraformed and tamed and occupied. At a guess I’ve climbed right through Yourdon’s security cordon, a level left open to vacuum. If I’d gone down I’d have found . . . what? Maybe a level where the experimenters live, where they’re working on the upgraded Curious Yellow. Or just as likely, another vacuum level.
My knees feel like rubber. I lean against the outer wall of the radial tube I’ve just climbed, feeling completely exhausted. I look up at the ceiling, almost half a kilometer up, and realize just how little it curves and how wide the basin of reality is. There are clouds in here, collecting near the tops of some of the needles. The air is slightly misty and smells of dry yeast. Strange monochromatic humps in the floor suggest hills and berms—mass reserves waiting for the giant habitat assemblers to go to work on them. I try to identify the end caps of the cylinder, but they’re lost in the haze, several tens of kilometers away. The light is coming from thousands of tiny bright points in the ceiling.
I could starve to death in this place long before I could walk out of it.
I try to rest up for a while, but unease prods me into premature motion. I know I need to try and accommodate this fatigue, but there’s an edge of panic whenever I think about Kay, or the consequences of the thing lurking in my head that (I’m half-convinced) is causing these blackouts. There’s not a lot I can do, except stay with the ladder and hope to find something more promising on the next deck up—almost a kilometer above my head. But I don’t think I’d make it.
I stumble away from the ladder, heading toward the nearest berm. Maybe there’ll be some emotional machinery near there that I’ll be able to communicate with, something from outside YFH-Polity’s frontier that’ll be able to put me in touch with reality. I try my netlink, but it’s dull and frozen, showing nothing but a crashed listing of point scores allocated to my cohort. Curious Yellow, I think dully. That’s why I can’t hear Sam when he says * * *: the score-tracking system is based on Curious Yellow.
A couple hundred meters from the berm I see signs of life. Something about the size of a taxi, consisting of loosely coupled rods and spheres, is hunching up over the crest of the deposit. It extends tubular sensors in my direction, then vaults over the crest of the hill, sensors blurring into iridescent disks, ball-and-rod assemblies spinning on its back. The balls are growing and thinning, unfolding like cauliflower heads that glow with a diffractive sheen. I stop and wait for it to arrive. I guess it’s some kind of specialized biome construction supervisor, an intelligent gardener. There is absolutely nothing I could do to stop it from killing me if it’s hostile—I might as well attack a tank with a blunt carving knife—but that’s relatively unlikely. Knowing that doesn’t make waiting easy, though.
It closes intimidatingly rapidly but rolls to a stop about three meters away from me. “Hello,” I say, “do you have a language facility?”
The gardener draws itself up until it looms over me. Florets open and close, buzzing faintly. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”
I relax very slightly. “I’m Robin.” The name feels odd, unfamiliar. “What polity is this?”
It buzzes and clicks to itself, flattening slightly at the top like a puzzled cobra. “Hello, Robin. This zone is no polity. It is ballast sector eighty nine, aboard the MASucker Harvest Lore. It is not an inhabitable biome. What are you doing here?”
No polity. I’m on a MASucker. Which means there’ll probably only be one longjump gate on the whole ship, heavily firewalled . . . I close my eyes and try not to sway on my feet. “I am trying to locate legal authorities to whom I can report a serious crime. Mass identity theft. If this isn’t a polity, what is it?”
“I am not authorized to tell you. You are Robin. I am required to ask you: How did you get here? You are showing signs of physical distress. Do you require medical attention?”
I attempt to open my eyes, but they’re not responding. “Help,” I try to say. Then my eyes open, and I’m back on the ladder, hanging off it by one hand, feet dangling over the abyss of an infinite cylinder, but there are no rungs and there’s another tube nested inside this one, stippled with a myriad of tiny points of light, and something is coming out of the wall to lean over me. “Help,” I repeat, as the thing bends toward me.
“I will alert the Kapitan’s lodge.”
Darkness.
WE declared victory within the local manifold ten megasecs ago, and the magnitude of the reconstruction headache is just beginning to sink in. We’ve driven Curious Yellow back into its box and broken up the quisling dictatorships that thrived under it. But the war isn’t over until a restart is out of the question. And that’s an entirely different matter.
“The problem is, about half of the Provisional Government have vanished,” Sanni—now a very senior colonel—tells me. (We’re in a staff meeting room in MilSpace, cramped and beige and securely anonymized.) “The high-profile arrests are all very well, but where are the others?” She doesn’t sound happy.
“They can’t just vanish. Not without leavi
ng some kind of traces, surely?” That’s Al, the long-suffering gofer who keeps our research team in touch with the operational requirements group and headquarters’ Received Instructions Interpretation Unit, whose job is to make sense of the oracular statements our Exultant patron occasionally offers. “There are a lot of scores to settle.”
“It’s a lot easier to slip through the cracks than it used to be,” Sanni explains patiently. “Back when the Republic was unitary it could track identities effectively. But since the end of Is, we’ve been left with a myriad of self-contained polities, not all of which will talk to each other. Their internal data models aren’t transitive. There could be any number of inconsistencies out there, and we can’t normalize for them.”
What she means is, the Republic of Is provided the most important common services a post-Acceleration civilization needs: time and authentication. Without time, you can’t be sure that the same financial instrument isn’t being executed in two different places at once. And without authentication, you can’t be certain that the person in Body A is the owner of Identity A, rather than an interloper who has stolen a copy of Body A. Time was easy before spaceflight because it was a function of geography, not network connectivity, and tracking people was easy because people couldn’t change species and sex and age and whatever on a whim. But since the Acceleration, the prevention of identity theft has become one of the core functions of government, any government. It’s not just a matter of preventing the most serious of crimes against the person; without time and authentication little things like money and law enforcement stop working.
Now the Republic of Is has fragmented, and its successor polities aren’t all running on the same time base. It’s possible to slip between the cracks and vanish. It’s possible for a hapless emigrant to leave Polity A for Polity B and arrive with a different mind directing their body, with all the authentication tokens that travel with them still pointing at the original identity. If your A-gate firewalls don’t trust each other implicitly, you’ve got a huge problem. Which is why we’re holed up here in a dingy cubicle in MilSpace discussing it, rather than returning to business as usual on the outside.
Glasshouse Page 26
