The other items in the basement are a lot more disconcerting.
For starters, there's something that I am almost certain is a full military A-gate. It's a stubby cylinder about two meters high and two meters in diameter, its shell slick with the white opacity of carbonitrile armor. There's a ruggedized control workstation next to it, perched on a rough wooden plinthyou use those things in the field when you'reoperating under emission control, to make field expedient whatever it is you need in order to save your ass. Got plutonium? Got nuke. Not that I've got the authentication ackles to switch the thing onif I mess with it I'll probably set off about a billion alarmsbut its presence here is as incongruous as a biplane in the bronze age.
For seconds, the walls are lined with racks of shelving bearing various pieces of equipment. There's what I'm fairly certain is a generator pack for a Vorpal sword, like the one on the Church altar. That brings back unpleasant memories, because I remember those swords and what you can do with themblood fountaining out into a room where the headless corpses are already stacked like cordwood beside the evacuation gateand it makes me feel nauseous. I take a quick breath, then I look at the shelves on the other side of the room. There are lots of them, some of them stacked with the quaint rectangular bricks of high-density storage, but most of the space is given over to ring binders full of paper. This time, instead of serial numbers on the spines, there are old-fashioned human-readable titles, although they don't mean much to me. Like Revised Zimbardo Study Protocol 4.0 , and Church Scale Moral Delta Coefficients , and Extended Host Selection Criteria
Host selection criteria? I pull that one off the shelf and begin reading. An indeterminate time later I shake myself and put it back. I feel dirty, somehow contaminated. I really wish I didn't understand what it said, but I'm afraid I do, and now I'm going to have to figure out what to do with the knowledge.
I stare at the A-gate, speculating. There's a very good chance that it's not infected with Curious Yellow, because they wouldn't want to risk infecting themselves. But it still won't help me escape, and it probably won't work for me anyway unless I can hold a metaphorical gun to Fiore's head, threaten him with something even more frightening than the prospect of Yourdon's revengeand if I've got the measure of Yourdon, any revenge he'd bother to carry out would truly be a worse fate than death.
Shit. I need to think about this some more. But at least I've got until tomorrow, when Fiore returns.
BUSINESS is dead, literally dead. After I go back up top and lock the repository, I flip the door sign to OPEN and sit at the front desk for a couple of hours, waiting tensely to see if the zombies are going to come and drag me off to prison. But nothing happens. I haven't tripped any alarms by my choice of lunchtime reading matter. With hindsight it's not too surprising. If there's one place Fiore and Yourdon and the mysterious Hanta won't want under surveillance, it's wherever they're hiding their experimental tools. Their kind doesn't thrive in the scrutiny of the panopticon. Which, as it happens, gives me an idea.
Midway through the afternoon I lock up for half an hour and hit the nearest electronics shop for a useful gadget. Then I spend a nervous hour installing it in the cellar. Afterward, I feel smug. If it works, it'll serve Fiore and Yourdon right for being overconfidentand for making this crazy simulation too realistic.
Business is so dead that I go home half an hour early. It's a warm summer evening, and I've got about two kilometers to walk. I barely see anyone. There are some park attendants out mowing the grass, but no ordinary folks. Did I miss a holiday or something? I don't know. I put one foot in front of the other until I hit the road out of the town center, follow it down into a short stretch of tunnel, then back into daylight and a quiet residential street with trees and a lazy, almost stagnant creek off to one side.
I hear voices and catch a faint smell of cooking food from one of the houses as I walk past. People are homeI haven't mysteriously been abandoned all on my own. What a shame. I briefly fantasize that the academicians of the Scholastium have figured out that all is not well in YFH-Polity and arrived to evacuate all of us inmates while I waited behind the library counter. It's a nice daydream.
Pretty soon I come to the next road tunnel linking hab segments. This time I pull out a flashlight as I pass out of sight of the entrance. Yes, just as I guessedthere's a recessed doorlike panel in one wall of the tunnel. I pull out a notepad and add it to my list. I'm slowly building up a map of the interrelated segments. It looks like a cyclic directed graph, and that's exactly what it is, a network of nodes connected by linesrepresenting roads with T-gates along their length. Now I'm adding in the maintenance hatches.
You can't actually see a T-gateit's just that one moment you're in one sector and the next moment you've walked through an invisible brane and you're in another sectorbut the positioning of the hatches can probably tell me something if I'm just smart enough to figure it out. Ditto the order of the network: if it's left-handed or right-handed, or if there's a Hamiltonian path through it. In the degenerate case, there may be no T-gates at all; this might actually be a single hab cylinder, divided up by bulkheads that can be sealed against loss of pressure. Or all the sectors may be in different places, parsecs apart. I'm trying to avoid making assumptions. If you don't search with open eyes, you risk missing things.
I get home at about my usual time, tense and nervous but also curiously relieved. What's done is done. Tomorrow Fiore will either notice my meddling, or he won't. (Or with any luck he'll assume Yourdon did it, which I think is equally likely. There's no love lost between those two, and if I play my cards right, I can exploit their division.) Either way I should learn something. If I don't... well, I know too much to stop now. If they knew how much I've figured out about their little game, they'd kill me immediately. No messing, no ritual humiliation in front of the score whores in Church, just a rapid brainsuck and termination. Fiore's playing with fire.
Sam is in the living room, watching TV. I tiptoe past him and head upstairs, badly in need of a shower. When I get to my room I shed my clothes, then go back to the bathroom and turn the water on, meaning to wash today's stresses away.
Seconds after I get in I hear footsteps, then the bathroom door opening. "Reeve?"
"Yeah, it's me," I call.
"Need to talk. Urgently."
"After I finish," I say, nettled. "Can't it wait?"
"I suppose."
Small torments add up; I'm now in a thoroughly bad mood. What's life coming to, when I can't even take a shower without interruption? I soap myself down methodically then wash my hair, taking care to rub the inefficient surfactant gel into my scalp. After a couple of minutes of rinsing, I turn off the water and open the door to reach for my towel, to be confronted by a surprised-looking Sam.
"Pass me the bath sheet," I tell him, trying to make the best of things. He complies hastily. Months of living in this goldfish bowl society have done strange things to my body-sense, and I feel surprisingly awkward about being naked in front of him. I think he feels it, too. "What's so important?" I step out of the shower as he holds the towel for me.