Scratch Monkey by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online Page B

pauses for effect. "Either you shut down the local expansion processor, or ... I have lots of weapons left."
    "That is the total content of your message?" I ask. I can feel the fresh wind blowing across my face; I think I'm high above the ground, looking out from a balcony in the turret of a castle ... but I can't tell for sure. That's the curse of blindness, the uncertainty. I'm locked into my childhood hell; all I can do to resist is to try to revert to the time when my entire body was an ear, to the time when the noise of sunlight falling on water was as loud as thunder. I feel as if I should be weaker, smaller, than I am. I have my ears , I tell myself.
    "Yes," she says. "That's what I want from you. This attempt to assassinate me is futile -- why can't the Superbrights just leave us alone? We represent no threat! They don't have to prey on us. They can eat dreams as well as minds." There's anger in her voice, and a sense of churning menace that makes my blood run cold; I don't doubt that if she wanted to she could blot out my consciousness like a gnat. "I am loyal to my species," she insists, almost petulantly. "It's your freedom I'm fighting for! The superbrights -- they treat us like animals! Without the freedom to suffer and die, what are we?"
    "How do you know they eat us?" I ask. "The network is expanding. New worlds are added. Uploads could just be being shunted over the local event horizon, to even up the load on new processor sites. Colonizing space --"
    "They're not," she says dogmatically. "That's a lie the Superbrights promote for their own purposes. Do you really think they'd tell you the truth if they knew it would make you question their motives?"
    "I don't know," I say diplomatically, biting back the rage building up inside me. "Maybe we need to live on the edge of existence in order to prove to ourselves that we exist; maybe -- " I shrug, unable to express what I'm feeling. They gave me eyes again, and you took them away . My guts are burning now. I know what I've got to do: I'm tense with anticipation.
    "Come, then," she says. "I'll put you on board one of the shuttles. Then you can rendezvous with your station and give them my message. It's not such a terrible thing, is it?"
    She guides me back towards the lift, not bothering to warn me that she's taking control of my legs again.
    "Your minions took my sight," I remind her.
    "They're brainburned fools. Ignorant. Why do you think I'm dealing with you directly?" The lift doors close and we drop a few floors. "You should consider yourself lucky to be alive."
    The doors open and she guides me forwards. I walk forever across a causeway of rock delimited by touch; nothing exists outside of that narrow track except the steady breeze and the slap of her sandals on stone. I sense something nearby that blocks the sun, then she stops me with a touch on my shoulder that feels like a bundle of bones bound together in parchment. "We'll go aboard in a minute," she says. "The ship is ready. You have a call sign for rendezvous? An orbital element set?"
    "Yes. I came in by drop capsule, but --"
    "Good. Just one last thing now, then you can go."
    I feel that itching again, at the sides of my head. "What is it?" I demand. "What are you doing?" I strain with every nerve to feel her presence, to hear the shifting of her robe in the wind, to imagine this remarkable woman in such perfect detail that my imagination becomes one with the real. I see her leaning on a cane beside the airlock of a battered shuttle, perhaps a metre away from me; her long, steel-gray hair is braided down her back. Her expression is stony and harsh. I paint the heraldic trappings of genocide in the background; barbed wire fences and watchtowers with searchlights. And then, tense as a live wire, I listen .
    "I'm going to have to program you," she says. "You've got a strong will and I don't trust you without MilSpec control -- " she pauses, alerted by her defences. "You can still see!" she says.
    I feel