Glasshouse - Charles Stross [69]
I have better luck in the department store, where I buy a new microwave oven, some clip-on spotlights, and a few other items. Then I go hunting for a craft shop. It takes me a while to find what I’m looking for, but in the end I discover one tucked in a corner of the shop, inside a pulp carton—a small wooden loom, suitable for weaving cloth. I buy it along with a whole bunch of woolen thread, just so nobody raises any eyebrows. Then I catch a taxi home and install my loot in the garage, along with the unfinished crossbow and the other projects.
It’s time to get things moving. It’s time I stopped kidding myself that I can fight my way out of here, and time that I stopped kidding myself that they’re going to let me go in (I checked the calendar) another ninety-four megaseconds. Forget the crossbow and the other toys I’ve been playing with. I’ve got a stark choice. I can conform like everyone else, go native in the pocket polity they’ve established, settle down and get on with the job of creating a generation of innocents who don’t even know there’s another universe outside. Who knows? After a gigasecond, will I even remember I had another life? It’s not as if my presurgery self left me much to hold on to . . .
Or I can try to find out what’s really going on. Fiore and his shadowy boss, Bishop Yourdon, are doing something with this polity, that much is clear. This isn’t just a straightforward experimental archaeology commune. Too many aspects of the setup turn out to be just plain wrong when you examine them closely. If I can figure out what they’re trying to do, maybe I can discover a way out.
Which is why I spend a personal infinity laboriously stripping reel after reel of copper wire of its insulation and threading it onto the loom. The first step in figuring out what’s going on is to get myself some privacy. I need a shoulder bag lined with woven copper mesh to accompany the bug-zapper (my repurposed microwave oven), and there’s no way I could order a Faraday cage from one of the stores without setting off alarms.
It takes me nearly two weeks to weave a square meter of copper wire broadcloth, working in darkness by touch alone. It’s really fiddly stuff to work with. The strands keep breaking or bending, it takes ages to strip the insulation, and besides, I’ve got a day job to go to.
Janis is complaining about minor back pains and spending a lot of time in the toilet each morning, coming out looking pale. There are fewer wisecracks and jokes from her, which is a shame. She’s beginning to bulge around the waist, too. She’s putting a brave face on it, but I think underneath it all she’s terrified. The prospect of giving birth like an animal (with all the attendant risk and pain) is enough to scare anybody, even if it didn’t come with the added horror of being chained down in this place for the indefinite hereafter, the product of your blood and sweat held hostage against your cooperation. What I want to know is, why isn’t there a resistance movement? I suppose in a panopticon anyone organizing such a thing would have to be very quiet about it—or very naive—but I can’t help wondering why I haven’t seen any signs of even covert defiance.
I checked the YFH-Polity constitution in the library (there’s a copy on a lectern out front, for everybody to read) and what’s missing from it is as important as what’s there. There’s a bill of rights that explicitly includes the phrase “right to life” (which, if you read some dark ages histories, doesn’t mean what a naive modern would