Glasshouse - Charles Stross [39]
Item number one on the checklist for the well-prepared fugitive: Know your escape routes.
I don’t call a taxi. Instead, I walk to the side of the road and look up and down it. The neighborhood is peaceful, if a bit peculiar. Huge deciduous plants grow to either side, and the vegetation gets wild and out of control near the boundaries of the garden associated with our house. Hidden invertebrates make creaking, grating noises like malfunctioning machinery. I try to remember the direction the taxi took us in. That way. I turn left and walk along the side of the road, ready to jump out of the way if a taxi appears suddenly.
There are other houses along the road. They’re about the same size as mine, clumps of rectangular boxes with glass-fronted openings in frames, sporting oddly tilted upper surfaces. They’re painted a variety of colors but look drab and faded, like dead husks shed by enormous land-going arthropods. There’s no sign of life in any of them, and I guess they’re probably just part of the scenery. I’ve got no idea where Cass lives, and I wish I did. I could go and visit her: For all I know she’s in the next house along from me. But I don’t know, and directory services are only one of the netlink-mediated facilities that are missing here, and Sam is right about one thing—the ancients were incredibly territorial. If they can call the public security forces and detain people simply for wearing the wrong clothes in public, what might they do if I went into someone else’s house?
A couple of hundred meters along the road, I come to a rise in the ground. The road continues on the level, descending into a deep trench, finally diving into a dark tunnel in the hillside. Looking up the sides I notice that something isn’t quite right about the trees. Gotcha, I think. This must be the edge of a hab module. I can just barely imagine what’s right beneath my feet—complex machinery locked within a skin of structural diamond, a cylinder kilometers long spinning in the void, orbiting in the icy darkness. Emptiness for a few tens of millions of kilometers, then a brown dwarf star little bigger than a gas giant planet, then tens of trillions of kilometers more to the nearest other star system. Scale is the first enemy.
I walk into the tunnel and see a bend ahead, beyond which it gets very dark. This is disturbing—I didn’t notice it when I was in the back of the taxi, even though my attention was being grabbed by every weird thing I saw. But if there’s a T-gate in here . . . Well, there’s only one way to find out. I keep my right hand in contact with the tunnel wall as it curves round into darkness. I keep walking slowly ahead, and after maybe fifty meters it begins to bend the other way. I pass another curve, then there’s light from the end of the tunnel, and I’m walking along a road where the buildings to either side are distinctly different in shape and size. There’s a sign ahead that reads: WELCOME TO THE VILLAGE. (A village is a small community; a downtown is the commercial area of a village. At least, I think that’s how it works.)
I’ve been doing my reading like a good citizen, and there are several places I need to go shopping, starting with a hardware store. The thing is, it seems to me that because these people couldn’t simply order any design patterns they needed out of an assembler, they had to make things themselves from more primitive components. This means “tools,” and it’s surprisingly easy to convert a good basic toolkit into an arsenal of field-expedient weapons. I’m probably safe in here as long as I don’t disclose my identity, but “probably” doesn’t get you very far when the alternative is lethal, and I’m already lying awake at night worrying about it.
I spend about half an hour in the hardware store, during which time I discover that the operator zombies aren’t programmed to stop females buying axes, crowbars, spools of steel wire, arc-welding rigs, subtractive volume renderers, or just about any other tool I can see. The kit I go for costs quite a bit and is bulky