I relax very slightly. "I'm Robin." The name feels odd, unfamiliar. "What polity is this?"
It buzzes and clicks to itself, flattening slightly at the top like a puzzled cobra. "Hello, Robin. This zone is no polity. It is ballast sector eighty nine, aboard the MASucker Harvest Lore. It is not an inhabitable biome. What are you doing here?"
No polity. I'm on a MASucker. Which means there'll probably only be one longjump gate on the whole ship, heavily firewalled ... I close my eyes and try not to sway on my feet. "I am trying to locate legal authorities to whom I can report a serious crime. Mass identity theft. If this isn't a polity, what is it?"
"I am not authorized to tell you. You are Robin. I am required to ask you: How did you get here? You are showing signs of physical distress. Do you require medical attention?"
I attempt to open my eyes, but they're not responding. "Help," I try to say. Then my eyes open, and I'm back on the ladder, hanging off it by one hand, feet dangling over the abyss of an infinite cylinder, but there are no rungs and there's another tube nested inside this one, stippled with a myriad of tiny points of light, and something is comingout of the wall to lean over me. "Help," I repeat, as the thing bends toward me.
"I will alert the Kapitan's lodge."
Darkness.
WE declared victory within the local manifold ten megasecs ago, and the magnitude of the reconstruction headache is just beginning to sink in. We've driven Curious Yellow back into its box and broken up the quisling dictatorships that thrived under it. But the war isn't over until a restart is out of the question. And that's an entirely different matter.
"The problem is, about half of the Provisional Government have vanished," Sanninow a very senior coloneltells me. (We're in a staff meeting room in MilSpace, cramped and beige and securely anonymized.) "The high-profile arrests are all very well, but where are the others?" She doesn't sound happy.
"They can't just vanish. Not without leaving some kind of traces, surely?" That's Al, the long-suffering gofer who keeps our research team in touch with the operational requirements group and headquarters' Received Instructions Interpretation Unit, whose job is to make sense of the oracular statements our Exultant patron occasionally offers. "There are a lot of scores to settle."
"It's a lot easier to slip through the cracks than it used to be," Sanni explains patiently. "Back when the Republic was unitary it could track identities effectively. But since the end of Is, we've been left with a myriad of self-contained polities, not all of which will talk to each other. Their internal data models aren't transitive. There could be any number of inconsistencies out there, and we can't normalize for them."
What she means is, the Republic of Is provided the most important common services a post-Acceleration civilization needs: time and authentication. Without time, you can't be sure that the same financial instrument isn't being executed in two different places at once. And without authentication, you can't be certain that the person in Body A is the owner of Identity A, rather than an interloper who has stolen a copy of Body A. Time was easy before spaceflight because it was a function of geography, not network connectivity, and tracking people was easy because people couldn't change species and sex and age and whatever on a whim. But since the Acceleration, the prevention of identity theft has become one of the core functions of government, any government. It's not just a matter of preventing the most serious of crimes against the person; without time and authentication little things like money and law enforcement stop working.
Now the Republic of Is has fragmented, and its successor polities aren't all running on the same time base. It's possible to slip between the cracks and vanish. It's possible for a hapless emigrant to leave Polity A for Polity B and arrive with a different mind directing their body, with all the authentication tokens that travel with them still pointing at the original identity. If your A-gate firewalls don't trust each other implicitly, you've got a huge problem. Which is why we're holed up here in a dingy cubicle in MilSpace discussing it, rather than returning to business as usual on the outside.
"We're going to have a huge problem with revenants," Sanni adds. "Not the solo ones who just want to hide. They'll mostly go to ground, set up a new identity, erase their memories of the war, build a new life. A whole bunch of dog-fucking criminals are going to think: Hey, I could be anyone tomorrow! And the dilemma we face is, is there really any point persecuting a former collaborator if they don't even remember what they did anymore? I figure we're best leaving the deserters to lie. But the organized groups are going to be a real headache. If they stay organized and hang on to their memories, they could try to start it all up again. We might be able to nail a bunch of them through traffic analysis, but what if they set up an identity remixer somewhere? If they can get lots of clean identities going into an isolated polity where they mingle with the criminals, bodies go in, bodies come out, and how would we know what's happening in the middle? If they're in charge of the firewall, they can play any number of tricks. A shell game."
"So we look out for things like that," Al suggests.
I stare at him, and force myself to wait for a couple of seconds before I open my mouth: Al isn't always fast on the uptake. "That's a fair description of any modern polity," I point out. "And we haven't consolidated control everywherewe've only broken CY's coordination capability within all the networks we're in direct communication with. If we want to clean up, we've got to go further."
"So?" Al glyphs amusement in lieu of having a face to smile with. "It's an ongoing process. Maybe you need to think about what you're going to do with the bad guys when you've rounded them up?"
14. Hospital
I hear dryness, and there's a taste of blue in my mouth, and I have an erection. I lick my lips and find my mouth is dry and tastes like something died in it. And I don't have an erection because I don't have a penis to have one with. What I've got is a bad case of, ofmemory fugue , I realize, and my eyes click open.
I'm lying between harshly starched white sheets, facing a white wall with strange sockets in it. Pale green hangings form a curtain on either side of my bed. Someone's put me in an odd gown with a slit running right up the back. The gown is also green. This must be the hospital, I think, closing my eyes and trying not to panic. How did I get here? Trying not to panic is a nonstarter. I gasp and try to sit up.
A few seconds later the dizziness subsides and I try again. My heart's pounding, I'm queasy, and the front of my head aches; I feel as weak as a jellyfish. Meanwhile the panic is scraping at my attention again. Who brought me here? If Yourdon finds me, he'll kill me! There's some kind of box with buttons on it hanging from a hook on the bed frame. I pick it up and stab a button at semirandom, and my feet come up. Other way! Ten seconds later I'm sitting up uncomfortably, the bed raised behind my back. It puts an unpleasant pressure on my stomach, but with verticality comes a minute degree of comfortI've got some control over my environmentbefore the greater unease sneaks up on me again.
Okay, so the gardener I trail off, my internal narrative stuck in a haze of incomprehension. It brought me here? Where is here, anyway? This bedit's one of a row, spaced alongside one wall in a huge, high-ceilinged white room. There's an array of windows set high up in the opposite wall, and I can glimpse blue and white sky through it. Incomprehensible bits of equipment are dotted around. There are lockers next to some of the bedsand I see that one of the beds at the other end of the room looks to be occupied.