Glasshouse - Charles Stross [89]
“Might be.” Septima looks irritated. “I’ll ask someone to investigate.” She stares right through me, a reminder that there are three or four other copies of this strange old archivist wandering the concentric cylinder habs of the ship.
She blinks rapidly. “It appears to be a security alert. Some sort of intruder just hit our transcription airgap. If you wait here a moment, I’ll go and find out what’s going on.”
She walks over toward the door of the teahouse and, as far as I can reconstruct later, this is the precise moment, when a swarm of eighteen thousand three hundred and twenty-nine wasp-sized attack robots erupt from the assembler in my family’s home. We live in an ancient dwelling patterned on a lost house of old Urth called Fallingwater, a conservative design from before the Acceleration. There are doors and staircases and windows in this house, but no internal T-gates that can be closed, and the robots rapidly overpower Iambic-18, who is in the kitchen with the gate.
They deconstruct Iambic-18 so rapidly there is no time for a scream of pain or pulse of netlinked agony. Then they fan out through the house in a malignant buzzing fog, bringing rapid death. A brief spray of blood here and a scream cut short there. The household assembler has been compromised by Curious Yellow, our backups willfully erased to make room for the wasps of tyranny, and, although I don’t know it yet, my life has been gracelessly cut loose from everything that gave it meaning.
After the executions, they eat the physical bodies and excrete more robot parts, ready to self-assemble into further attack swarms that will continue the hunt for enemies of Curious Yellow.
I know about this now because Curious Yellow kept logs of all the somatic kills it made. Nobody knows why Curious Yellow did this—one theory is that it is a report for CY’s creators—but I have watched the terahertz radar map of the security wasps eating my family and my children so many times that it is burned into my mind. I’m one of the rare survivors among the millions targeted as somatic enemies, to be destroyed rather than edited. And now it’s as if I’m watching it again for the first time, reliving the horror that made me plead with the Linebarger Cats to take me in and turn me into a tank. (But that was half a gigasecond later, when the Grateful for Duration made contact with one of the isolated redoubts of the resistance.)
I realize I’m awake, and it’s still nighttime. My cheeks itch from the salty tracks of tears shed in my sleep, and I’m curled up in an uncomfortable position, close to one edge of the bed. There’s an arm around my waist, and a breathing breeze on the back of my neck. For a moment I can’t work it out, but then it begins to make sense to me. “I’m awake now,” I murmur.
“Oh. Good.” He sounds sleepy. How long has he been here? I went to bed alone—I feel a momentary stab of panic at the thought that he’s here uninvited, but I don’t want to be alone. Not now.
“Were you asleep?” I ask.
He yawns. “Must have. Dozed off.” His arm tenses, and I tense, too, and push myself back toward the curve of his chest and legs. “You were unhappy.”
“What I didn’t tell you earlier.” And I’m still not sure it’s a good idea to tell him. “My family. Curious Yellow killed them.”
“What? But Curious Yellow didn’t kill, it edited—”
“Not everyone.” I lean against him. “Most people it edited. Some of us it hunted down and murdered. The ones who might have been able to work out who made it, I think.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Not many people do. You were either directly affected, in which case you were probably dead, or it happened to someone else, and you were busy rebuilding your life and trying to make your struggling firewalled micropolity work without all the external inputs provided by the rest of Is-ness. A gig after the end of the war it was old news.”
“But not for you.”
I can feel Sam’s tension through his arm around me.
“Look, I’m tired, and I don’t want to revisit it. Old pains, all right?” I try and relax against the side