Glasshouse - Charles Stross [100]
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 can be 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