But I can't remember their faces, and even nowa lifetime after the grief has ebbedthat bugs me.
Neual was quick with hands and feet, taking slyly sarcastic delight in winding me up. Lauro had perfect manners but lost it when making love with us. Iambic-18 was a radical xenomorph, sometimes manifesting in more than one body at the same time when the fancy took it. Our children...
Are all dead, and it is unquestionably my fault. The nature of Curious Yellow is that it propagates stealthily between A-gates, creating a peer-to-peer network that exchanges stegged instructions using people as data packets. If you have the misfortune to be infected, it installs its kernel in your netlink, and when you check into an A-gate for backup or transportwhich proceeds through your netlinkCY is the first thing to hit the gate's memory buffer. A-gate control nodes are supposedly designed so that they can't execute data, but whoever invented CY obviously found a design flaw in the standard architecture. People who have been disassembled and reassembled by the infected gates infect fresh A-gates as they travel. CY uses people as a disease vector.
The original CY infection that hit the Republic of Is installed a payload that was designed to redact historical information surrounding some eventI'm not sure what, but I suspect it's an aftershock left by the destruction of one of the old cognitive dictatorshipsby editing people as they passed through infected gates. But it only activated once the infection had spread across the entire network. So Curious Yellow appeared everywhere with shocking abruptness, after spreading silently for hundreds of megasecs.
In my memory-dream, I am taking tea in the bridge of the Grateful for Duration, which in that time takes the form of a temple to a lake kami from old Nippon. I'm sitting cross-legged opposite Septima (the ship's curator) and waiting for Kapitan Vecken to arrive. As I spool through some questions I stored offline, my netlink hiccups. There's a cache-coherency error, it seemsthe ship's T-gate has just shut down.
"Is something going on?" I ask Septima. "I've just been offlined."
"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 thisone theory is that it is a report for CY's creatorsbut 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 aloneI 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 of his body. "I've become a creature ofsolitary habits. Didn't do to get too close to anyone during the war, and since then, haven't had the opportunity."
His breathing is deep and even. Maybe he's already asleep. I close my eyes and try to join him, but it takes me a long time to drift off. I can't help wondering how badly he must have been missing contact with another human being, to share my bed again.
11. Buried
MONDAY is a working day, and it's also usually a lunch date, but I'm not about to break bread with Jen after yesterday's events. I head for work with the brass key hidden in my security bag. Once inside I rip into the filing and cleaning immediately. It's midmorning before I realize that Janis hasn't arrived yet.
I hope she's all right. I don't remember seeing her yesterday, but if she's heard about what happenedwell, I don't know how close to the victims she was, but I can only imagine what she must be going through if she knew them well. She was feeling ill a couple of days agohow is she now?
I head for the front desk. Business is dead today, and I haven't had a single visitor, so I have no qualms about flipping the sign on the door to CLOSED for a while. In the staff room there's a file of administrative stuff, and after leafing through it for a bit, I find Janis's home number. I dial it, and after a worryingly long time someone answers the telephone.
"Janis?"
Her voice sounds tired, even through the distortion the telephone link seems to be designed to add. "Reeve, is that you?"