Glasshouse - Charles Stross [83]
Meanwhile, outside the cars and the corridors and the gates and the head games we deny playing with each other, there’s a real universe. And sometimes it smacks you in the face.
Like now. I have known all along, in an abstract kind of way, that we’re living in a series of roughly rectangular terrain features laid out on the curved inner surface of several huge colony cylinders, spinning to provide centripetal acceleration (a substitute for gravity), in orbit around who-knows-what brown dwarf stars. The sky is a display screen, the wind is air-conditioning, the road tunnels are a necessary part of the illusion, and if you go for a walk in the overgrown back lot you’ll find a steep hill or cliff that you can’t climb because it goes vertical only a few meters up. I haven’t given much thought to how it’s all stitched together, other than to assume there are T-gates in each road tunnel. But what if there’s another way out?
I clutch his hand. “Stop! Turn your flashlight back. Yes, there, right there.”
“What is it?” he asks.
“Let’s see.” I tug him toward it. “Come on, I need the light.”
The tunnel walls are made of smoothly curved slabs of concrete set edge to edge, forming a hollow tube maybe eight meters in diameter. The road is a flat sheet of asphalt, its edges meeting the walls of the tube just under the halfway point up its sides. (Now that I think about it, what could be running under the road deck? It might be solid, but then again, there could be just about anything down there.) What I’ve noticed is a rectangular groove in the opposite wall. Close up I can see it’s about a meter wide and two meters high, a plain metal panel sunk into one side of the tunnel. There’s no sign of any handle or lock except for a hole a few millimeters in diameter drilled halfway up it, just beside one edge.
“Give me the flashlight.”
“Here.” He passes it without argument. I get as close to the wall as I can and shine the light into the crack. Nothing, no sign of hinges or anything. I crouch down and shine it into the hole. Nothing there, either. “Hmm.”
“What is it?” he asks anxiously.
“It’s a door. Can’t say more than that.” I straighten up. “We can’t do anything about it right now. Let’s go home and think about this.”
“But if we go home, we won’t be able to talk!” In the dim light of the flashlight, his eyes look very white. “They’ll overhear everything.”
“They don’t see everything,” I reassure him. “Come on, let’s go home. This afternoon I want you to mow the lawn.”
“But I—”
“The lawn mower is in the garage,” I continue implacably. “Along with other things.”
“But—”
“If they’re not waiting for us when we get home, they’re not monitoring the tunnels, Sam. Noticed your netlink recently? No? Well, we don’t seem to have lost any points just now. There are gaps in the surveillance coverage. I think I know somewhere else they’re not monitoring, and you ought to know we’re not the only people who want out.”
I feel safe telling him that much, even though if they brainscoop me and feed me to Curious Yellow right now, it’ll take down three of us: me and Sam and Janis. Kay may be in denial right now but she—No, you’ve got to keep thinking of him as Sam, I tell myself—isn’t, I think, going to sell me to the bad guys. I am pretty sure I can read Sam well enough now to know what’s bugging him. It’s funny how I was in lust with Kay but couldn’t tell if I trusted her. Now I trust Sam, but I doubt I’ll ever fuck him again. Life is strange, isn’t it? “You do want out, don’t you?” I ask.
“Yes.” He sounds tremulous.
“Then you’re going to have to trust me for a little bit longer because I don’t have an escape plan yet.” I squeeze his hand. “But I’m working on