Glasshouse - Charles Stross [107]
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