Glasshouse - Charles Stross [108]
“It’s a blind,” I say, then yawn. It must be the adrenaline rush finally subsiding. “Fiore, Yourdon, and the other one. Psywar specialists working on emergent group behavior controls.” The blackouts seems to have jostled free some more fragmentary memories, dossiers on—“War criminals. Ran the security apparat for the Third People’s Glorious Future Sphere. When the vermifuge was released, they went on the run. They’ve spent the past gigasecs working on a countervermifuge, then on a way to harden Curious Yellow.”
I blink. Is this me, talking? Or a different me, using my speech centers to communicate with the rest of—whoever I am?
“Priority. Exfiltration. Priority. Exfiltration.” My hands are moving over the gate control systems even without me willing them. “Shit!” I yelp. But there’s no stopping them, they know what they’re doing. They seem to be setting up an output program.
“System unavailable,” says the gate, its tone of voice flat and unapologetic. “Longjump grid connectivity unavailable.”
Whatever my hands are doing, it doesn’t seem to work. Something has shaken loose inside my memory, something vast and ugly. “You must escape, Reeve,” I hear my own voice telling me. “This program will auto-erase in sixty seconds. Network connectivity to external manifold is not available from this location. You must escape. Auto-erase in fifty-five seconds.”
Even though I’m only wearing clothes-liners, I break out in a cold sweat up and down my spine. “Who are you?” I whisper.
“This program will auto-erase in fifty seconds,” something inside me replies.
“Okay, I hear you! I’m going, I’m going already!” I’m terrified that when it says this program it means me—obviously it’s some kind of parasite payload, like the Curious Yellow boot kernel. But where can I escape to? I look up, at the ceiling, and it clicks into place. I need to go up, through the walls of the world. Maybe, just maybe, this polity is interleaved with others—if so, if I can just break into an upper or lower deck, there may be a way to get to a T-gate and rejoin the manifold of the Invisible Republic. “Going up, right?”
“This program will auto-erase in thirty seconds. Escape vector approved. Conversational interface terminated.”
It goes very quiet in my head; I stand over the assembler terminal shivering, taking rapid shallow breaths. A shadow seems to have passed from my mind, leaving only a cautious peace behind. The horror I feel is hollow, now, an existential dread—So they hid zombie code inside me? Whoever they were?—but I’m back, I’m still me. I’m not going to suddenly stop existing, to be replaced by a smiling meat puppet wearing my body. It was just an escape package, configured to report home after a preset period or some level of stress if I couldn’t figure out what to do. When it couldn’t dial out, it issued a callback to me, the conscious cover, and told me what it wanted. Which is fine. If I do what it wants and escape, then I can get any other little passengers dug out of my skull and everything will be great! And I want to escape anyway, don’t I? Don’t I? Think happy thoughts.
“Fuck, I just killed Fiore,” I whisper. “I’ve got to get out of here! What am I doing?”
Upstairs, the common room is as steamy as a sauna. Coughing and choking I dial down the heat, grab my damp clothes, and pull them on, then head for the door. Then—this is the hardest part—I pat my hair into order, pick up my bag, and calmly walk across the front lot toward the curb to hail a passing taxi.
“Take me home,” I tell the driver, teeth nearly chattering with fear.
Home, the house I’ve shared with Sam for long enough to make it feel like somewhere I know, is a scant five minutes away by taxi. It feels like it’s halfway to the next star system. “Wait here,” I tell the driver. I get out and head for the garage. I don’t want to see Sam, I really hope he’s at work—if he sees me, I might not be able to go through with this. Or even worse, he might get dragged in. But he