Fearful weapons appear, seemingly at random, engaged on search and destroy missions for who knows what. Someone, somewhere, is writing the macros, and the only way to stay clear is to sever all T-gate connections, shutting the rogue assemblers off from their orders. But the A-gates are still infected, still running Curious Yellow. And if you use them to make more A-gates, those will be infected, too, even if you write complete new design templatesCurious Yellow's payload incorporates a pattern recognizer for nanoreplicators and inserts itself into anything that looks even remotely similar. The only solution is to drop back to prereplicator tech, use the infected gates to make dumb tools, then try to rebuild a sterile assembler from the wreckage of post-Acceleration technosystems.
Or you can surrender to Curious Yellow and try to live with the consequences, as the Linebarger Cats explain to me in words of one syllable. Then they ask me what I intend to do, and I ask if I can sign up.
Which explains how I ended up as a tank, but not really why.
I wake up as the bright light of dawn crosses the edge of my pillow. I stretch and yawn and look at Sam sleeping beside me, and for a heart-stoppingly tender moment I long to be back on the outside, where I'm Robin and she's Kay and we're both properly adjusted humans who canbe whoever we want to be and do whatever we want to do. For a moment I wish I'd never found out who he was...
So I force myself to get out of bed. It's a library day, and I need to be there because I've got at least one customer to deal withFiore. I'm tired and apprehensive, wondering in the cold light of day if I've blown everything. The idea of going through a normal working cycle after what happened last night feels bizarre, the sort of thing a zombie would doas if I'm entirely a creature of unconscious habit, obedient to the commands of an unknown puppeteer. But there's more to it than just doing the job, I remind myself. I've got a different goal in mind, something else that the day job is just a cover for. I'm still not entirely sure what's going on here, why I was sent, and who Yourdon and Fiore are, but enough stuff has surfaced that I can make an educated guess, and the picture I'm piecing together isn't pretty.
I'm fairly sure that from the outside YFH-Polity must appear to be a successful social psychology experiment. It's a closed microcosm community with its own emergent rules and internal dynamics that seem to be eerily close to some of the books I've been reading in my spare hours in the library. It's got to be providing great feedback on dark ages society for Yourdon and Fiore to wave under the noses of the academic oversight committee appointed by the Scholastium. But on the inside of the glasshouse, things are changing very rapidly. When Yourdon and Fiore and the mysterious Hanta announce a continuation, and say that all the inmates have agreed to extend their consent, nobody's going to look too deeply. By then, the experimental population will have nearly doubled. Half the inmates will be newborn citizens, unknown to the oversight committee on the outside. Maybe it's even worse than thatI ought to go to the hospital and visit Cass, nose around, and see what their maternity facilities are like. I'll bet they're pretty advanced for a dark ages facility. And that they're expecting plenty of multiple births.
There's also the question of the box files in the document repository. I figure they contain about a billion words of data, committed to a storage medium that is stable for tens of gigasecs, potentially even for hundreds. Spores. That's what they need the babies for, isn't it? I can't remember why we don't have repeated outbreaks of Curious Yellow anymore, it's one of those memories that's buried too deeply for me to retrieve. But there's got to be a connection, hasn't there? The original Curious Yellow infection spread via human carriers, crudely editing them to insert its kernel code and making them issue debugger commands to load and execute on each assembler they found. It spread via the netlink. Our netlinks don't work properly, do they? Hmm. The new A-gates are different, but they're equally a monoculture, just one that's designed to resist Curious Yellow's infection strategy. I can't help thinking about that MilSpec assembler in the library basement. There's something I'm missing here, something I don't quite have enough data for
I'm dressed for work, standing in the kitchen holding a mug of coffee, and I don't remember how I got here. For a moment I shudder, in the grip of an anonymous sense of abstract horror. Did I just get dressed, walk downstairs, and make coffee in an introspective haze as I tried to get to grips with the real purpose of this facility? Or is something worse happening? The way I can read the words "I love you" but hear them as "* * *" suggests something's not quite right in my speech center. If I'm suffering memory dropouts, I could be quite ill. I mean, really ill. The small of my back prickles with cold sweat as I realize that I might be about to unravel like a knit jumper hooked by a nail. I know my memory's full of gaps where associations between concepts and experiences have been broken, but what if too much has gone? Can the rest of me just disappear spontaneously, speech and memory and perceptions falling victim to an excess of editing?
Not knowing who you are is even worse than not knowing who you were.
I get out of the house as fast as I can (leaving Sam asleep upstairs in the bedroom) and walk to work. The weather is as hot as usualwe seem to be moving into a scheduled "summer" seasonand I make good time even though I set off in the opposite direction from normal, intending to loop around the back way and come into the downtown district where the library is via a different road.
I open up the library. It's neat and tidywhen neither Janis nor I are there I guess there's probably a zombie janitor on staff duty. I head to the back room to fortify myself with another coffee before Fiore arrives, and as I'm waiting for the kettle to boil I get a surprise.
"Janis! What are you doing here? I thought you were ill."
"I'm feeling a lot better," she says, summoning up a pale smile. "Last week I was getting sick a lot, and the lower back pain was getting to me, but I'm less nauseous now, and as long as I don't have to do a lot of bending or lifting, I should be all right for a while. So I thought I'd come in and sit in on the front desk for a bit."
Shit. "Well, it's been very quiet for the past few days," I tell her. "You don't have to stay." A thought strikes me. "You heard about Sunday."
"Yes." Her expression closes up. "I knew something bad was going to happenEsther and Phil were too indiscreetbut I didn't expect anything like..."
"Would you like some coffee?" I extemporize, trying to figure out how to get her out of here while I do things that could get me into deep shit if they go wrong.
"Yes, please." She's got that brooding look, now. "I could strangle the greasy little turd."
"Fiore's visiting this morning," I say, managing to pitch my voice as casually as I can, hoping to get her attention.
"He is, is he?" She looks at me sharply.
I lick my lips. "Something else happened last night. Iit would really help if you could do me a favor."
"What kind of favor? If it's about Sunday"
"No." I take a deep breath. "It's about one of my cohort. Cass. Her husband, Mick, he's been, uh, well, some of us went round yesterday night, and we took her to the hospital. We're making sure he doesn't go anywhere near her, and meanwhile"
"Mick. Short guy, big nose, eyes as mad as a very mad thing indeed. That him?"