I step through the door and glance around. I'm in a small room with some kind of crude-looking machine occupying most of it. Gas bottles, axles, physical valves. It looks as if it was built during the stone age and designed to be maintained using tools from the hardware store. Maybe it was? I scratch my head. If this hab was originally configured for some kind of paleo cult, made to resemble one of the polities of old Urth, it would be relatively easy for Yourdon and Fiore to tailor to their purposes, wouldn't it? Maybe that's what old-me meant about this place having unique features suiting it to their needs. There's a ladder, of all things, bolted to the wall, and a hatch in the floor. I go over to the hatch in the floor, which is secured by a handwheel. Turning the wheel isn't too hard, and after a moment there's a faint breeze as the hatch rises and rotates out of the way.
Hmm . There's a pressure imbalance, but it's nothing major. That means open doorways, maybe a whole deck down below. But I said I'd go up, didn't I? I start to climb. The hatch in the ceiling has another wheel, and it takes me longer to rotate it, but there's some sort of spring mechanism inside it that raises it out of the way. That's smart design for you. They assume that pressure breaches come from outside, which in a rotating cylinder hab like this means down, so you have to exert force to open a hatch leading down. But hatches leading up have a passive power assist to make it easy to get away from the blowout. I like that philosophy: It's going to make life ever so much easier.
I climb into the tunnel, then pause to pull my headlamp on. Getting it lit, I climb up above the hatch. Then I step sideways off the ladder and close it behind me. I'm now at the bottom of a dark tunnel occupied only by the ladder, punctuated by shadows far above me, and the trail I've left leads down instead of up. I hope there are doors up there. It would be really shitty luck to have gotten this far only to find they're all jammed or depressurized or something.
13. Climb
BATTALION HQ doesn't send me direct to Staff. Instead, they put me through an A-gate, and I come out wearing my original ortho body. I feel small and incredibly fragile and alive. It's an alarming experience that later reminds me of my arrival in YFH-Polity. After my reanimation, they disassemble me and split me into about 224 separate stripes of data and zap it off over quantum-encrypted links via different T-gates. I don't feel this process, of course. I just get into an A-gate and wake up sitting in another one. But along the way I've been fed through a cryptographic remixer circuit, combined and recombined with other data streams with serial numbers filed off, so that even if a couple of the nodes have fallen into enemy hands, they won't be able to work out where I'm coming from, where I'm going, or who I am.
I blink and come alive again, then open the door of the booth. A tense momentI'm about to enter the semimythical head office of the Linebarger Cats. A compactly built female xeno with feline features is waiting for me, tapping her claw-tipped fingers. "You're Robin, aren't you?" She says. "I love you."
"I'm sorry, are you sure you've got the right person?" I ask.
She bares needle-sharp fangs at me in something approximating a smile: "In your dreams. It's just a diagnostic test patched into your new netlinkif you can hear the words, it means you're not carrying a copy of Curious Yellow. Welcome to the crazy camp, Sergeant-Multiple. I'm Captain-Doctor Sanni. Let's go find an office and I'll explain what's going on."
Sanni is an odd mixture of sly articulacy and shy secretiveness, but she's read my paper and decided I'm wasted on line ops, and she's got the clout to make it stick. When she tells me why, I'm inclined to agree. This problem is a whole lot more interesting than blowing holes in defensive perimeters, and much more important in the long term.
"Curious Yellow can be broken," she explains. "All we have to do is to fracture enough network links that the cost of maintaining internal coherency among the worm farms exceeds their available bandwidth. When that happens, it'll lose the ability to coordinate its attacks, and we can then defeat it in detail. But the problem is what happens afterward."
"After." I shake my head. "You're already thinking about the postwar situation?"
"Yes. See, Curious Yellow isn't going to go away. We could replace all the A-gates in human space with another monoculture, and they'll still be just as prone as the last set to infestation by another coordinated worm attack. And running a polyculture is going to be expensive enough that local monocultures will have a competitive edge... In the long run, it'll evolve back toward a state that is vulnerable to similar infestations. What we need is an architectural solutionone that locks Curious Yellow out by design. The best way to do that is not to eliminate the worm, but to repurpose it."
"Repurpose it?"
"As an immune system."
It takes our team, which is one of about fifty groups working under General-Dean Aton, nearly a gigasec to work out the details of that single short sentence and turn it into a weapon. We methodically iterate through hundreds of possibilities, researching the effects on a firewalled experimental network of worm-infested gates before the final working solution is clear, and it takes hundreds of megs to implement and distribute it. But when the main operations group is ready to launch the brutal physical assaults on a thousand network junctions that will ultimately bring down Curious Yellow, the vaccine is waiting for them.
Curious Yellow is a coordinated worm. It accepts instructions from remote nodes. It compares instructions with its neighbors, and if they look right, it executes themthis keeps any single worm-infested gate from being easily subverted. By simultaneously assaulting thousands, we convince them that our new instructions are valid and to be obeyed, and they begin to spread out through the network. The vermifuge is a hacked version of Curious Yellow, equipped with a new payload. It does several tasks that, in combination, should suffice to keep a new infestation down. When humans go through a 'fuged A-gate, the gate installs Sanni's diagnostic patch in their language centers, while purging any Curious Yellow infection already present. The diagnostic patch is a simple dyslexic loopif you're also infested with Curious Yellow you won't be able to hear the words "I love you." The final stage of the operation is that once the vermifuge is in place in a wormed gate, it will refuse to accept new instructions broadcast by Curious Yellow's creators.
We spend a gigasec working all this out and applying it. Tens of thousands of unique soldier-instances die, assaulting hardened positions in order to load copies of the vermifuge into the first gates they capture. Civilian losses are scary, too, millions dying as the embattled and increasingly disconnected Curious Yellow nodes take random defensive measures, and their quislings lash out at their invisible tormentors. But in the end resistance virtually collapses in the space of a single tenday. There's chaos everywhere, atrocities and score-settling and panic. There are even some cases of starvation and life-support collapse, where all the assemblers stopped working throughout an entire polity. But we've won, and the factional groups in the alliance either disband or become petty governments, starting the long process of rebuilding their little defensible corners of the former megapolity.
The Linebarger Cats mostly go back to their prewar activities, a troupe of historic re-enactment artists in the pay of a retiring metahuman power who has spent the past gigasecs sleeping through the chaos. But not all of us can let go and forget...