Glasshouse - Charles Stross [0]
Acknowledgments
Note
1 Duel
2 Experiment
3 Nuclear
4 Shopping
5 Church
6 Sword
7 Bottom
8 Child Thing
9 Secret
10 State
11 Buried
12 Bag
13 Climb
14 Hospital
15 Recovery
16 Suspense
17 Mission
18 Connections
19 Longjump
Epilogue
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Glasshouse
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2006 by Charles Stross
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is
http://www.penguinputnam.com
ISBN: 978-1-1012-0859-5
AN ACE BOOK®
Ace Books first published by The Ace Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
Electronic edition: June, 2006
Ace titles by Charles Stross
SINGULARITY SKY
IRON SUNRISE
ACCELERANDO
THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES
GLASSHOUSE
For Ken MacLeod
Acknowledgments
Thanks due to: James Nicoll, Robert “Nojay” Sneddon, Cory Doctorow, Andrew J. Wilson, Caitlin Blasdell, David Clements, Sean Eric Fagan, Farah Mendlesohn, Ken MacLeod, Juliet McKenna, and all the usual suspects.
“This apparatus,” said the Officer, grasping a connecting rod and leaning against it, “is our previous Commandant’s invention. . . . Have you heard of our previous Commandant? No? Well, I’m not claiming too much when I say that the organization of the entire penal colony is his work. We, his friends, already knew at the time of his death that the administration of the colony was so self-contained that even if his successor had a thousand new plans in mind he would not be able to alter anything of the old plan, at least not for several years . . . It’s a shame that you didn’t know the old Commandant!”
—“In the Penal Colony,” Frank Kafka
Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians?
—Adolf Hitler, 1939
Note
The polities descended from the Republic of Is do not use days, weeks, or other terrestrial dating systems other than for historical or archaeological purposes; however, the classical second has been retained as the basis of timekeeping.
Here’s a quick ready-reckoner:
one second
One second, the time taken for light to travel 299,792,458 meters in vacuum
one kilosecond
Archaic: 16 minutes
one hundred kiloseconds (1 diurn)
Archaic: 27 hours, 1 day and three hours
one megasecond (1 cycle)
Ten diurns. Archaic: eleven days and six hours
thirty megaseconds (1 m-year)
300 diurns. Archaic: 337 Earth days (11 months)
one gigasecond
Archaic: approximately 31 Earth years
one terasecond
Archaic: approximately 31,000 Earth years (half age of human species)
one petasecond
Archaic: approximately 31,000,000 Earth years (half elapsed time since end of Cretaceous era)
1
Duel
A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls. Her hair forms a smoky wreath around her open and curious face. She’s interested in me.
“You’re new around here, aren’t you?” she asks, pausing in front of my table.
I stare at her. Apart from the neatly articulated extra shoulder joints, the body she’s wearing is roughly ortho, following the traditional human body plan. The skulls are subsized, strung together on a necklace threaded with barbed wire and roses. “Yes, I’m a nube,” I say. My parole ring makes my left index finger tingle, a