Glasshouse

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 canbe whoever we want to be and do whatever we want to do. For a moment I wish I'd never found 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!

It's frustrating. It's also immensely worrying because there's more at risk here than simple personal danger—whether from the experimenters or the other victims. I have a faint inkling of the pain and suffering Curious Yellow caused the first time it got out, and of the terrible struggle it took to chop up the worm's Chord-type network and sterilize every single assembler. It ruptured what was once an integrated interstellar civilization, smashing it into a mess of diamond-shard polities. How did we stop it . . . ?

Footsteps. It's Fiore, looking curiously self-satisfied as he heads toward the library doors.

"Finished, Father?" I call.

"Yes, that is all for today." He inclines his head toward me, a gesture that's evidently intended to be gracious but that comes over as a pompous bob. Then his eyebrows furrow in a frown. "Ah yes, Reeve. You were involved in the business last night, I believe?"

My left hand tightens on the knife handle inside my bag. "Yes." I stare him down. "Do you know what Mick was doing to Cass?"

"I know that"—something seems to occur to him, and he changes direction in midsentence—"it is a most serious thing indeed to interfere in the holy relation between husband and wife. But in some circumstances it may be justifiable." He stares at me owlishly. "She was pregnant, you know."

"And?"

He must think my expression is one of puzzlement, because he explains, "If you hadn't intervened, she might have lost the child." He glances at his watch. "Now, you must excuse me—I have an appointment. Good day." And he's off through the door again like a shot, leaving me watching him from behind, mouth agape with disbelief.

Why is Fiore concerned with the health of a fetus, but not about its mother being assaulted, repeatedly raped, held prisoner for weeks, maimed in such a way that she may never walk again? Why? He's got all the human empathy of a zombie. What's wrong with him? And why did he suddenly change his tune? I'd swear he was about to denounce what we did last night, but then he moderated his line. Fear of what the Bishop might say if he incited another near riot over the way we rescued Cass, or something else?

They want us to have lots of children. But why is that important to them? Is it something to do with Curious Yellow?

I grind my teeth until Fiore is out of sight, then I hop down from my stool, hang up the CLOSED sign, and head for the lock-up. The secret basement downstairs is as I left it except for the assembler, which is chugging to itself and gurgling as it loads feedstock or coolant or something through pipes in the floor. I guess Fiore's set it running some kind of long batch job. But checking up on it isn't why I'm down here right now—I'm here to retrieve the video cartridge from the camcorder I left running on the equipment shelf.

The camcorder is a small metal box with a lens on one side and a screen covering the other. I don't know what's going on inside it. It certainly isn't an original dark ages artifact—I've seen pictures of them in the library books—but it does the same job. Along with all the other tech artifacts in this polity, some set designer probably slaved over it for hours trying to figure out how to give it the right functionality without adding too much. They got it wrong, but not too wrong. The original machines used things called "tapes" or "disks," but this one just writes everything it sees onto a memory diamond the size of a sand grain that's good for a gigasec of events.

I go sit down on the sofa to play with the 'corder. Putting my bag down next to me, I poke at the display until I've zapped back an hour or three. Then I fast-forward through darkness until the light comes on and Fiore comes in. At triple normal speed I watch as he goes over to the bookshelves and leafs through a couple of folders. I pause and zoom in to see what he was reading: POLICY ON SEXCRIME, followed by a glance at FAMILIAL STABILITY INDEX, whatever that is. Next, he trots over to the A-gate and chatters to it, gesturing at the terminal. I don't see any sign of biometric authentication, no retinal scan or anything, but he may have used a password. The gate cylinder rotates around its long axis, and he steps inside. Fast-forward and about a kilosecond later he steps out again, blinking. So he's just backed himself up, has he?

Back at the control terminal Fiore issues some more commands, and the gate begins chugging to itself. I glance over my shoulder. Yes, it's still doing that—just some kind of long synthesis job. He heads for the staircase and—

Shit! I whip round and reach for my bag. The A-gate cylinder is opening.

Knife in left hand, bag in right hand. Everything is crystal clear. Fiore suspected. He backed himself up, then set an ambush, and I've blown it. The cylinder turns and the interior cracks into view. White light, a smell of violets and some kind of weird volatile organics, a bit of steam. There's someone/something in there, moving.

I dart forward, bag raised, knife ready to block. They're sitting up, head turning. I'll only get one chance to do this. Heart pounding, I upend the empty shoulder bag over the head, lank black hair—fat jowls wobbling indignantly hands coming up—and I shove the knife blade up against his throat and yell, "Freeze!"

The duplicate Fiore freezes.

"This is a knife. If you move or make a sound or try to dislodge the bag over your head, I will cut your throat. If you understand, say yes."

His voice is muffled, but sounds almost amused. "What if I say no?"

"Then I cut your throat." I move the knife slightly.

"Yes," he says hurriedly.

"That's good." I adjust my grip. "Now let me tell you something. You are thinking you have a working netlink and you can call for help. You're wrong, because netlinks work via spread spectrum, and you're wearing a Faraday cage over your head, and although it's open at the bottom you're standing in a cellar. The signal's attenuated. Do you understand?"

Pause. "There's nobody there!" He sounds slightly panicky. Clever fellow.

"I'm glad you said that because if you hadn't, I'd have cut your throat," I tell him. "Like I said earlier, if you try and lose the bag, I'll kill you immediately."

He's shaking. Oh, I shouldn't be enjoying this, but I am. For everything you've done to us I ought to kill you a hundred times over. What have I turned into? I'm almost shaking with the intensity of—it's like hunger, the yearning. "Listen to these instructions. I will shortly tell you to stand up. When I do so, I want you to slowly rise, keeping your arms by your sides. If at any point you can't feel the knife, you'd better freeze, because if you keep moving, I'll kill you. When you're on your feet, you will step fifty centimeters forward, then slowly move your hands behind your back. You will then lace your fingers together. Now, slowly, stand up."

Fiore, to give him his due, has a cool enough head to do exactly as I tell him with no hesitation and no hysterics. Or maybe he just knows exactly what he can expect if he doesn't obey. He can't be under any illusions about how hated he is, can he?

"Forward one pace, then hands behind back," I say. He steps forward. I have to stretch to keep the knife around his neck, but I reach down with my free hand and follow his right arm round. Now is the moment of danger—if he were to kick straight back while blocking with his left shoulder he could hurt me badly and probably get away. But I'm betting Fiore knows very little indeed about serious one-on-one physical mayhem, and the bag over his head should keep him disoriented long enough for me to do this. I step to one side, reach into my pocket with my right hand until I find what I'm after, then squeeze the contents of the tube over his hands and fingers. Cyanoacrylate glue—the librarian's field-expedient handcuffs. "Don't move your hands," I tell him.

"What is it—" He stops. Of course he can't help moving his hands and the stuff flows into small cracks. It's less viscous than water but it polymerizes in seconds. I move the knife round to the side of his neck and examine my handiwork. He might be able to get his hands apart if he's willing to leave skin behind, but he won't be able to take me by surprise while he's doing it.

"Okay, we're now going to take three slow steps forward. Yes, you can shuffle. I'll tell you when to stop—easy, easy, stop!"

I stop him in the middle of an open patch of floor. I need to think. He's breathing hoarsely inside the improvised hood, and he stinks of fear-sweat. Any moment now, he'll realize that I can't let him live, then he'll be uncontrollable. I've got maybe twenty seconds—

"When my husband says * * * I can't hear him," I say conversationally. "What does that mean?"

"It means you're infected with Curious Yellow." He sounds oddly placid.

"You ran off a duplicate of yourself as a guard to see who was coming in here," I tell him. "That was smart. Were you afraid I was using the A-gate?"

"Yes," he says tersely.

"It's immune to the strain I'm infected with, isn't it?" I ask.

I can feel his muscles tensing. "Yes," he says reluctantly.

"And Yourdon didn't insist it was locked to your netlinks?" I ask, tensing as I gamble everything on the right answer.

He doesn't give it to me verbally, but he grunts and begins to pull his hands apart and I know I'm right, but I also know I've got about three seconds left. So I step in close behind him and run my right hand down his chest, caressing, and he freezes when I get to his crotch. A moment of relief—he's anatomically orthohuman, and male. I grab his balls and squeeze viciously. He jackknifes forward, speechless and gasping, almost knocking me over with the violence of it, and the bag goes flying. But that's okay, because a moment later I grab his hair and while he's preoccupied with the terrible breath-sucking pain, I pull his head up and run the knife blade smoothly through his carotid artery and thyroid cartilage, just below the hyoid bone.

See, the difference between me and Fiore is that I don't enjoy killing, but I know how to do it. Whereas Fiore gets off on control fantasies and watching his score whores lynch lovers, but it didn't occur to him to tell the assembler to restore him holding a weapon, and it took him almost twenty seconds to realize that I was going to have to kill him regardless of anything he did or said. Basically, Fiore is your bureaucrat-type killer who runs push-button experiments by remote control, while I'm—

I blank again.

THE civil war lasts two gigasecs, nearly sixty-four years by the reckoning of long-lost Urth. It's probably still raging in some far-flung corners of human space. When the longjump network was shattered in an attempt to firewall the damage, it split the interstellar net into disjoint domains separated by lightspeed communications lag. Isolated pockets of Curious Yellow are probably still running, out beyond the liberated light cone, in the eternal darkness and cold—just as there may be outposts of free posthumanity who dropped off the net when the Republic of Is disintegrated. Redaction, the deletion of memory, is Curious Yellow's deadliest weapon—some of those polities might have been deliberately forgotten, their proximal T-gate endpoints dropped into stars and the memories of their existence erased from everyone who used an infected A-gate. The true horror of Curious Yellow is that we have no way of knowing how much we have lost. Entire genocidal wars could have been wiped from our memories as if they never happened. Perhaps this explains the worm's peculiar vendetta against practicing historians and archaeologists. It, or its creator, is afraid we will remember something . . .

I spend my first gigasec among the Cats being a tank. There's very little that is human left in me once I get a clear picture of what's going on. It's not hard to generalize from the tales of random atrocities committed against people who specialize in the past; besides, the gigasecond of nonexistence I spent aboard Grateful for Duration is a small death in its own right—time enough for children to mature as adults, for spouses to despair, mourn, and move on. Even if by some miracle my family hasn't been targeted for liquidation because of my career, they're still lost to me. That sort of experience tends to make one bitter. Bitter enough to give up on humanity as a bad job, bitter enough to experiment with other, more sinister, identities.

About my body: I mass approximately two tons and stand three meters high at the shoulder. My nervous system is nonbiological—I'm running as a real-time sim with sensory engagement through my panzer's pain nerves. (The long-term dangers of complete migration into virtch are well understood, but avoidable to some extent by maintaining a somatotype and staying anchored in the real world. Besides which, there's an emergency to deal with.) If I have to, I can accelerate my mind to ten times normal speed. My skin is an exotic armor, pebbled with monocrystalline diamonds held in a shock-absorbent quantum dot matrix that can be fast-tuned to match the color of any background from radio frequencies through to soft X-rays. For fingernails I have retractable diamond claws, and for fists—clench and point—I have blasters. I don't eat, or breathe, or shit, but take power from a coil wrapped around an endless stream of plasma gated from the photosphere of a secret star.

As a callout sign I adopt the name liddellhart. The other Cats don't know what this signifies. Maybe that explains why over the bloody course of four hundred megs and sixteen engagements I end up being promoted to template-senior sergeant and replicated a hundredfold. Unlike Loral and some of the others, I don't freeze up when there's a problem. I don't experience shock and dissociation when I realize we've just decapitated twelve thousand civilians and shoved their heads into a tactical assembler that is silently failing to back them up. I do what's necessary. I don't hesitate when it's necessary to sacrifice six of me in a suicide attack to buy time for the rest of the intrusion team to withdraw. I don't feel anything much except for icy hatred, and while I appreciate in the abstract that I'm sick, I'm not willing to ask for medical attention that might impair my ability to fight. Nor do our shadowy directors, who are watching over us all, see fit to override me.

For the first gigasec, we pursue the war by traditional methods. We find half-forgotten T-gates leading into polities under the control of Curious Yellow. We go through, shoot up the assemblers they're using as immigration firewalls, establish a toehold, fight our way in, install sanitized A-gates of our own, and forcibly run the civilian population through them to remove the Curious Yellow taint from their heads. The ones who survive usually thank us afterward.

At first it's relatively easy, but later we find we are attacking polities where the defenses are heavier, and later still Curious Yellow starts programming the civilians to fight bitterly and without quarter. I've seen naked children, shaking in the grip of an existential breakdown, walking toward panzers with Vorpal blades clutched inexpertly in both hands. And I've seen worse things than that. The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.

Quite late on in the campaign I realize this and, in a fitful flashback to my earlier self, I begin to spend some of my spare time thinking about the implications. My study of the psychology of collaboration becomes one of the most heavily accessed stacks in the Cats' internal knowledge base. So it probably shouldn't come as a surprise when I receive a summons to headquarters, combined with orders to converge my deltas and revert to orthohuman skin before transit.

At first I'm apprehensive. I've grown used to being an armored battalion, spending most of my seconds between action in icy orbit around a convenient failed star or exoplanet. Breathing and eating and sleeping and emoting are worrying, senseless handicaps. I recognize that they are of interest in comprehending the enemy motivational framework, and allowances must be made for them among the people we liberate, but why should I subject myself to the frailties of flesh? But eventually I realize that it's not about me. I need to be able to work with the headquarters staff. So I reconverge my various selves, erasing my identity from the kilotons of heavy metal that have until so recently been my limbs, and I report to the nearest field command node for up-processing.

WHEN I come to, I find I'm leaning over the A-gate control panel. In my left hand I'm clutching a dripping knife so tightly that my fingers are close to cramping. There's blood halfway across the room, forming an obscene lake.

If I got it right, he won't have had time to use his netlink. He'll have been in acute physical agony as his head came out of the bag, then he'll have blacked out because of blood loss. Unconsciousness within ten seconds: It's more than he deserved.

But now I've got a huge problem, namely a hundred and ten kilos of dead meat lying in about ten liters of gore in the middle of a grass carpet that's already dying. Is this incriminating or what? Oh, and my sweater and skirt and sensible shoes are covered in blood. This does not look good.

I laugh, and it comes out as a hysterical giggle with more than a little madness in it. This is bad, I think. But there's got to be something —

For a moment I flash back to the time with the malfunctioning A-gate, the pools of fluid and lumps of deanimated meat. That helps stabilize me, in a way: It makes it clear what I have to do. I pick up Fiore's arm and give it an experimental tug. His sallow flesh ripples, and when I put my back into it, he jerks free of the carpet and skids a few centimeters toward me. I grunt and tug again, but it's not easy to move him so I pause for a bit and look around. There's some kind of cabling on one of the tool shelves, so I go over and grab a couple of meters of wire, twine it around his torso under the arms, and use it to pull him toward the A-gate. Finally, I get him into position, back inside the gate chamber. It's hard to keep him inside—one leg keeps flopping out—but eventually I figure out that I can hold him in if I use the rest of the cable to truss him up.

"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 inspection 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.