Down on the Farm by Stross Charles Read Free Book Online

the hell just happened
?—I’m kneeling on a hard surface, bowed over so my head is between my knees. My right hand—something’s wrong with it. My fingers don’t want to open. They’re cold as ice, painful and prickly with impending cramp. I try to open my eyes. “Urk,” I say, for no good reason. I hope I’m not about to throw up.
    Sssss...
    My back doesn’t want to straighten up properly but the floor under my nose is cold and stony and it smells damp. I try opening my eyes. It’s dark and cool, and a chilly blue light flickers off the dusty flagstones in front of me.
I’m in a cellar
? I push myself up laboriously with my left hand, looking around for whatever’s hissing at me.
    “BAD Patient!
Ssssss!”
The voice behind my back doesn’t belong to anything human. I scramble around on hands and knees, hampered by the chessboard glued to my frozen right hand.
    I’m in Matron’s lair.
    Matron lives in a cave-like basement room, its low ceiling supported by whitewashed brick and floored in what look to be the original Victorian era stone slabs. The windows are blocked by columns of bricks, rotting mortar crumbling between them. Steel rails run around the room, and riding them, three Sisters glide back and forth between me and the open door. Their optics flicker with amethyst malice. Off to one side, a wall of pale blue cabinets lines one entire wall: the front panel (covered in impressive-looking dials and switches) leaves me in no doubt as to what it is. A thick braid of cables runs from one open cabinet (in whose depths a patchboard is just visible) across a row of wooden trestles to the middle of the floor, where they split into thick bundles and dangle to the five principal corners of the live summoning grid that is responsible for the beautiful cobalt-blue glow of Cerenkov radiation—and tells me I’m in deep trouble.
    “Integer overflow,” intones one of the Sisters. Her claws go
snicker-snack
, the surgical steel gleaming in the dim light.
    Here’s the point: Matron isn’t
just
a 1960s mainframe: we can’t work miracles and artificial intelligence is still fifty years in the future. However, we
can
bind an extradimensional entity and compel it to serve, and even communicate with it by using a 1960s mainframe as a front-end processor. Which is all very well, especially if it’s in a secure air-gapped installation with no way of getting out. But what if some double-domed theoreticians who are working on a calculus of contagion using AXIOM REFUGE accidentally talk in front of one of its peripheral units about a way of sending a message? What if a side-effect of their research has accidentally opened a chink in the firewall?
They’re
not going to exploit it...but they’re not the only long-term inmates, are they? In fact, if I was
really
paranoid I might even imagine they’d put Matron up to mischief in order to make the point that closing the Farm is a really bad idea.
    “I’m not a patient,” I tell the Sisters. “You are not in receipt of a valid Section two, three, four, or 136 order subject to the Mental Health Act, and you’re bloody well not getting a 5(2) or 5(4) out of me either.”
    I’m nauseous and sweating bullets, but there is this about being trapped in a dungeon by a constrained class four manifestation: whether or not you call them demons, they play by the rules. As long as Matron hasn’t managed to get me sectioned, I’m not a patient, and therefore she has no authority to detain me.
I hope
.
    “Doc-TOR HexenHAMMer has been SUM-moned,” grates the middle Sister. “When he RE-turns to sign the PA-pers Doc-TOR RenFIELD has prePARED, we will
HAVE YOU
.”
    A repetitive squeaking noise draws close. A fourth Sister glides through the track in the doorway, pushing a trolley. A white starched cotton cloth supports a row of gleaming ice-pick shaped instruments. The chorus row of Sisters blocks the exit as effectively as a column of riot police. They glide back and forth as