Glasshouse - Charles Stross [106]
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 sleepingand emoting are worrying, senseless