Glasshouse - Charles Stross [112]
Back at the top of the cliff they insisted on making me watch the last half minute of my life over and over again. I shook my head and went into the A-gate to revert to my orthobody back down at the coffeehouse on the rocky shore beside the lake at the bottom of the waterfall. I stayed there for a long time. I couldn’t stop wondering what it must have been like to be there. The hot dull pain in my mid-hand, the tumbling and whipping chill of the wind, the certainty that I’m going to die—
I wondered if I’d ever find out.
It happened a long time ago. Since then, hair-raising topological exploits with the Linebarger Cats—not to mention age and cynicism—have shown me how the way we warp and twist space-time has impaired our ability to comprehend the structures we inhabit. Architecture has always influenced or controlled social organization, but in a polity connected by T-gates, it has become more than influential—architects have become our dictators.
The vast majority of us live in the frigid depths of space, in spinning cylinders of archaic design that orbit brown dwarf stars or the outer gas giants of solar systems in which no world remotely like long-dismantled Urth could ever form. For the most part we pay no attention to the underpinnings of our human-habitable spaces, save when they inconvenience us and we need to repair or replace them. They’re the empty stages upon which we parade the finery of our many-roomed mansions, interlaced by holes in space that annul the significance of the dark light years between . . .
. . . Until you try to climb one of the emergency maintenance shafts. Then you know about it.
The ladder rungs are anchored to the antispinward wall of the shaft, rising toward the infinity of darkness that swallows my flashlight beam whenever I look up. Below me there’s a long drop to a floor as unforgiving as the rocks at the foot of that waterfall. I climb steadily, pacing myself. The radius of curvature of the hab segments in YFH-Polity is small enough that if this is a single cylinder, it must be several kilometers in diameter. The roof of our hab is too high to touch from on top of a four-story building—the tallest structures in downtown—but I’m already far above that, with no sign of any openings.
At two hundred rungs I stop and rest. My arms are already feeling sore, muscles complaining. If I hadn’t been working out for weeks, I’d be half-dead by now. I have no way of knowing how much farther I’ll have to climb, and a dull worry gnaws at my stomach. What if I’m wrong? I’m assuming YFH-Polity is what it appears to be—a bunch of hab sectors spliced together with T-gates, interleaved among other self-contained polity segments across a multiplicity of real-space habitats. But what if they’ve gone further than simply blocking access to the rest of the network? It used to be the glasshouse, after all. What if my embedded passenger got it critically wrong, and we’re actually stranded in a single location? There might be no way out.
But I can’t go back. Yourdon must have figured out I’m on the loose by now. He’ll mobilize the zombies and hunt me down like a rat cornered by army ants. Sam will be alone, wondering what happened, getting lonelier and crazier and more depressed. Sooner or later Mick will get his hands on Cass again. Jen will continue to play her malignant head games with Alice and Angel. Fiore will slowly turn the entire community into festering hate-filled puppets dancing to the tune of a dark ages culture based on insecurity and fear. And I’m fairly certain I know what their game is.
This isn’t an archaeology experiment, it’s a psychological warfare laboratory. They’re testing out their design for an emergent behaviorally controlled society. YFH-Polity is a prototype for the next generation of cognitive dictatorship. Because, when they surface to release their