Scratch Monkey by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online Page A

closes and we begin to rise.
    We ascend for an eternity, and then the lift stops. I hear the door open, and then another set of doors open; "step forward another three paces," she says.
    I do what she wants and almost walk into a railing. I can feel a steady breeze, the warm glow of sunlight on the skin of my face, a cool metal rail beneath my hands. The stones beneath my bare feet are warmed by the invisible sun. "Steady now," she says. "You're looking out across my personal spaceport. There are two shuttles on the field; my resource base is in deep orbit, where it can out-build your weapons systems before you can find it. Your Superbrights masters would never let us live in peace, you see," she says; "it's not in their interests to let human beings learn the truth about the Dreamtime. So I had to either go outside the Dreamtime, beyond all human settlement, or destabilize it locally to disrupt their feeding patterns. The former was impossible, but the latter ... all it takes is a little leverage..."
    "That's it!" I say. "You're blinding and killing people in bulk, to overload the local Dreamtime substrate. Is that true? So that eventually their children can live without hope of an afterlife, of a second chance when this life is over? You blind and kill how many people a day?"
    I can hear birds singing in the distance. I realise that I may never hear them again. I'm probably grinning like a corpse but I don't care -- she must know by now that blind people often smile. It's easier to grin than to frown; the facial muscles contract into a smirk more easily. Even when you're about to die.
    "It takes a lot of stress to unbalance a network processor the size of a small moon," she replies calmly; "it shows a remarkable degree of fault tolerance. As for physical assault, the automatic defences are still armed ... as they always have been. So If we want to take it for ourselves, we must overwhelm it by frontal assault, sending uploaded minds out into the simulation space until it overloads and drops into NP-stasis. They do that if you feed them faster than they can transfer capacity elsewhere, you know. It's happened before, and it's what the Superbrights are most afraid of. A Dreamtime they lose contact with means a human world that will not succumb to their domination again. Only then will we be safe. The superbrights need uploaded minds, you see. Their intelligence needs so much input that they consume human personalities or they go insane from memetic deprivation. Overloading the Dreamtime ... you wouldn't believe how many of them it takes." She falls silent for a moment, and I focus on the sound of her breathing. It's noisy -- perhaps a touch of asthma in this tropical climate? I hear, again, the rustle of her garment as she turns her head towards me.
    "But what have the superbrights done to you?" I ask, not quite believing that I can talk. I feel dizzy. Weak, too. She's completely crazy but there's a power in her voice that overwhelms me, driving me mad with something like a lust for blood. "All they do is stabilize the Dreamtime for everybody's benefit."
    "If only you'd listen ..." she stops. I hear her swallow. Deep emotion ; I've hit some kind of sensitive spot. She believes what she's saying, however warped and mad it sounds. If I had nothing worse to fear it would give me pause for thought. What if there's a germ of truth in it? "It's for their own benefit. They eat human minds! Like demons! -- but everything they've taught you contradicts that. They're benefactors, to you. You look after their interests, which superficially look beneficient. But they aren't, not really. If you don't believe me, ask your owner! We know the truth --"
    She pauses. The manic urgency leaves her voice. She continues: "I want you to take a message to your controller in Distant Intervention. I don't intend to take action against the rest of the Dreamtime network, but they must recognise that we do not want the Dreamtime here in this system." She