Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [250]
The corridor they’re standing in has the usual quasi-organic rounded-off corners in its rectangular cross-section, and curves smoothly around to the left and right. The glowing mother-of-pearl surfaces are pocked with holes, studded with chitinous lenses and membranes – and, hacked crudely in, mikes and cameras, office windows and doors. Already alarms are echoing along the corridor, and rippling along the wires. Soldier and Spy, time-sharing Dee’s senses and transmitters, hack and ping. Some of the alarm-signals are disrupted.
But not all. With a silent conference of glances, Dee and Ax turn and race to the left. They head for the lift which they used to ascend from street-level. Doors open down the corridor in front of them, alarms shrill again. A security guard in a black uniform steps out and raises a hand. He’s just in sight around the curve of the corridor. Dee skids to a stop and catches Ax’s arm.
‘Back!’ she gasps.
They turn and run back. The guard’s footsteps echo behind them. Dee notices, out of the corner of her eye, a movement behind a thin area of the wall – not a window, but internal to the building. She runs on for a few metres and then stops and turns. The guard is just coming into view. She aims carefully at the thin patch and shoots at it. It shatters like glass and a blue, bubbling liquid floods out, slicking the floor. The guard slips on it and tumbles, then jumps up and begins tearing off his uniform and yelling for help. Dee can sense a barrier up ahead, thick and resilient – perhaps a cordon of guards; she can’t be sure at this distance.
Close by there’s an elliptical hole in the wall. Somebody has scrawled above it ‘FIRE EXIT?!’ Dee looks at it, looks at Ax, raises her eyebrows. Ax nods.
Dee peers in. It’s a dark chute, sloping sharply down and turning out of sight. She steps in, lies down on her cloak, and lets go of the top edge of the hole.
She instantly finds herself plunged downwards and whirled around what feels like an almost vertical spiral drop. ‘AAAAAHHHHH!’ she observes. Her scream is quite involuntary, but it comes too late to discourage Ax, who’s followed her a scant second later. His heels are perilously close to her hooded head. She hunches forward, only to see the drop as even more terrifying. Her ankles are crossed, her hands are clasping the cloak in front of her thighs. It’s all she can do not to curl up into a ball. The walls of the tube are in places transparent – at some moments she sees, or thinks she sees, over the city’s roofs, at others she glimpses the interiors of rooms, with the startled faces of their occupants looking straight back at her for fractions of a second. She can smell the fabric of the cloak beginning to scorch.
Her other senses are utterly confused. She retreats to the detached perspective of Sys, which is already running the first steps of the bale-out routine, getting ready for somatic systems failure. Dee has a brief, chilling image of her computer detaching itself from the remains of her animal brain and crawling out of the bloody wreckage of her skull.
Then she’s sliding along more slowly, in an open space. Light shines on her closed eyelids. She opens them and finds herself still whizzing along, but decelerating…she braces her shoulders and, right on Newtonian cue, Ax’s heels cannon into them. Daylight and open air, and people yelling.
Dee sprawls and stops. Everything is still spinning. She sits up and looks around. Ax is a few metres away, eyes still shut, mouth open. They’re at the bottom of a gentle slope of black, vitrified material at the foot of the tower, in a plaza. Among benches and fountains and the entrances to other buildings, people are staring at her.
Just to the right of her right hand, a centimetre-wide hole appears in the black glass. Cracks radiate out from it. At the same time, she hears a soft pock.
Another hole, closer.
‘She-it!’
Dee leaps up, staggers forward and