Glasshouse by Charles Stross

Author:Charles Stross
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science-Fiction
ISBN: 9781101208595
Publisher: Ace
Published: 2006-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

THAT afternoon Sam changes into jeans and a T-shirt and mows the lawn. I’m in the garage wearing overalls and safety goggles, because I’ve made a mold from the plaster of paris dies and I’m pouring solder into it, casting a lead copy of the key to Fiore’s cabinet of curiosities. The lead key won’t turn in the lock, but it’ll do okay as a template for the engraving disk and the small bar of brass I’ve got waiting.

To confuse anyone who’s watching, I’ve got some props sitting around—a wooden wall plaque purchased from the fishing store, a plate to engrave with some meaningless dedication. When I showed Sam what I was up to he blinked rapidly, then nodded. “It’s for the women’s freehand cross-stitch club,” I said, pulling the explanation right out of my ass. There is no such club, but it sounds right, a backup explanation that will trigger a reflex in whatever watcher is scanning us for anomalous behavior.

We may be living in a glass jar with bright lights and monitors trained on us the whole time, but it’s not likely that everything we do is being watched by a live human being in real time. We massively outnumber the experimenters, and they’re primarily interested in our public socialization. (At least, that’s the official story.) To monitor an intelligent organism properly requires observers with a theory of mind at least as strong as the subject. We subjects outnumber the experimenters by a couple of orders of magnitude, and I’ve seen no sign of strongly superhuman metaintelligences being involved in this operation, so I think the odds are on my side. If we are up against the weakly godlike, I might as well throw in the towel right now. But if not . . . You can delegate all you want to subconscious mechanisms, but you run the risk of them missing things. Sic transit gloria panopticon.

The Church services are almost certainly monitored in every imaginable way. But after Church, Fiore and his friends will be too busy re-running the lynching from every imaginable angle and trying to figure out how the social dynamics of a genuine dark ages mob operate. They won’t be watching what I get up to in the garage until much later, probably just a bored glance at a replay to make sure I’m not fucking my neighbor’s husband or weeping hysterically in a corner. Because they’re used to using A-gates to fab any physical artifacts they need, they probably look at what I’m doing as some sort of dark ages hobby and view me as a slightly dull but basically well-adjusted wife. I even gained a couple of points last week for my weaving. I laboriously hand-wove a Faraday cage lining for my shoulder bag right under their noses, and they treated it as if I was diligently practicing a traditional feminine craft! There are gaps in their surveillance and bigger gaps in their understanding, and those gaps are going to be their downfall.

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