Glasshouse - Charles Stross [116]
I attempt to open my eyes, but they’re not responding. “Help,” I try to say. Then my eyes open, and I’m back on the ladder, hanging off it by one hand, feet dangling over the abyss of an infinite cylinder, but there are no rungs and there’s another tube nested inside this one, stippled with a myriad of tiny points of light, and something is coming out of the wall to lean over me. “Help,” I repeat, as the thing bends toward me.
“I will alert the Kapitan’s lodge.”
Darkness.
WE declared victory within the local manifold ten megasecs ago, and the magnitude of the reconstruction headache is just beginning to sink in. We’ve driven Curious Yellow back into its box and broken up the quisling dictatorships that thrived under it. But the war isn’t over until a restart is out of the question. And that’s an entirely different matter.
“The problem is, about half of the Provisional Government have vanished,” Sanni—now a very senior colonel—tells me. (We’re in a staff meeting room in MilSpace, cramped and beige and securely anonymized.) “The high-profile arrests are all very well, but where are the others?” She doesn’t sound happy.
“They can’t just vanish. Not without leaving some kind of traces, surely?” That’s Al, the long-suffering gofer who keeps our research team in touch with the operational requirements group and headquarters’ Received Instructions Interpretation Unit, whose job is to make sense of the oracular statements our Exultant patron occasionally offers. “There are a lot of scores to settle.”
“It’s a lot easier to slip through the cracks than it used to be,” Sanni explains patiently. “Back when the Republic was unitary it could track identities effectively. But since the end of Is, we’ve been left with a myriad of self-contained polities, not all of which will talk to each other. Their internal data models aren’t transitive. There could be any number of inconsistencies out there, and we can’t normalize for them.”
What she means is, the Republic of Is provided the most important common services a post-Acceleration civilization needs: time and authentication. Without time, you can’t be sure that the same financial instrument isn’t being executed in two different places at once. And without authentication, you can’t be certain that the person in Body A is the owner of Identity A, rather than an interloper who has stolen a copy of Body A. Time was easy before spaceflight because it was a function of geography, not network connectivity, and tracking people was easy because people couldn’t change species and sex and age and whatever on a whim. But since the Acceleration, the prevention of identity theft has become one of the core functions of government, any government. It’s not just a matter of preventing the most serious of crimes against the person; without time and authentication little things like money and law enforcement stop working.
Now the Republic of Is has fragmented, and its successor polities aren’t all running on the same time base. It’s possible to slip between the cracks and vanish. It’s possible for a hapless emigrant to leave Polity A for Polity B and arrive with a different mind directing their body, with all the authentication tokens that travel with them still pointing at the original identity. If your A-gate firewalls don’t trust each other implicitly, you’ve got a huge problem. Which is why we’re holed up here in a dingy cubicle in MilSpace discussing it, rather than returning to business as usual on the outside.
“We’re going to have a huge problem with revenants,” Sanni adds. “Not the solo ones who just want to hide. They’ll mostly go to ground, set up a new identity, erase their memories of the war, build a new life. A whole bunch of dog-fucking criminals are going to think: Hey, I could be anyone tomorrow! And the dilemma we face is, is there really any point persecuting a former collaborator if they don’t even remember what they did anymore? I figure we’re best leaving the deserters to lie. But the organized groups are going to be a real headache. If they stay organized and hang