Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

knees. ‘My name is Irina Gu-zulescu. Pleased to meet
you.’
    They stood looking at each other in the narrow hallway.
Institutional linoleum, grey paint and green trim, black
stairway. The place smelt of old paper and cigarette smoke.
Posters – shiny repro or faded original – from the
Soviet Union and the Former Union: Lenin, Stalin, Gorbachev,
Antonov, solemn; Gagarin, smiling. The Yeltsingrad Siege: heroic
child partisans aiming their Stingers at the Pamyat Zeppelins.
The building was completely silent and there was nobody else
around.
    ‘I was kind of expecting more people here,’ Myra
said. ‘I left a message.’
    ‘Like I said.’
    ‘Oh.’ Myra felt baffled and miffed.
    ‘Your cases arrived safely,’ Irina said, as though
to mollify her. She escorted her up the narrow black-bannistered
stairs to the library. The stair carpet wasfrayed to the point of
criminal negligence. The library itself was cramped, a maze of
bookcases through which one had to go crabwise. Several
generations of information technology were carefully racked above
the reading-table. Myra’s crates were stacked beside
it.
    TU leave you to it,’ Irina said.
    Thanks.’
    Myra, alone, pulled down her eyeband, upped the gain, looked
down at the crates and sighed. They were still bound with metal
tape. She clicked her old Leatherman out of its pouch and got to
work opening them, coiling the treacherously sharp bands
carefully into a waste-paper basket. Then she had to pull the
nails, like teeth. Finally she was able to get the files out.
    She sorted the paper files into stacks: her personal stuff
– diaries and letters and so on – and political,
sorted by time and organization, all the way back from her ISTWR
years through to internal factional documents from that New York
SWP branch in the 1970s. These last still made her smile: had
there really ever been anyone daft enough to choose as his nomme de guerre for a debate about the armed struggle
‘Dr Ahmed Estraguel’?
    She worked her way, similarly, through the formats and
conversions from Dissembler through DoorWays to Linux to Windows
to DOS, and through storage media from the optical disks and
bubble-magnetic wafers and CD-RWs (‘CD-Rubs’, they
used to be called) to the floppy disks, almost jumping out of her
seat at the noise the ancient PC made when it took the first of
those. In the quiet building, it sounded like a washing-machine
on the spin cycle.
    After about an hour and a half, which passed ina kind of
trance, all her optical and electronic files were copied to the
Institute’s electronic archive. She blinked up her eyeband
menu, and invoked Parvus.
    ‘Hi,’ she said.
    ‘Hello,’ he said.
    She felt almost awkward. ‘Do you mind having a copy
taken, and its being downloaded?’
    The entity laughed. ‘Mind? Of course not! Why should I
mind?’
    ‘OK,’ Myra said. She uncoiled a fibre-optic cable
from the terminal port and socketed it to her eye-band. ‘I
want your copy to guard this collection of files ‘ she ran
her highlighting finger over it ‘- and anything
you’ve got with you right now, applying the kind of
discretionary access criteria that your existing parameters
permit. Give the scaling a half-life of, oh, fifty years. Got
that?’
    ‘Yes.’ Parvus smiled, doubled, then one of him
disappeared dramatically like a cartoon genie swooshing back into
a bottle.
    ‘Done,’ he said. It had taken longer than
she’d expected – she must have had more files on her
personal datadeck than she’d realised.
    ‘Thank you,’ said Myra. ‘Anything to report,
by the way?’
    Parvus shrugged expansively. ‘Nothing that can’t
wait. Except that Glasgow Airport is closed.’
    ‘What?’
    Surely not a coup, not here –
    ‘Fighting on the perimeter. Damage to the runways. Just
Green partisans, nothing serious, but there’s no chance
you’ll get your flight on Monday.’
    ‘Oh, shit. Book me a train. For tomorrow, OK? Catch you
later.’
    She disengaged the cable link and let it roll back. Then she
got to work labelling the stacks, dating thepaper folders and
making notes for the Institute’s archivist.
    Somebody clattered up the stairs, strode into the library and
flicked the light on. Myra turned around sharply and met the
surprised gaze of the girl who’d identified her at the
demo.
    ‘Oh!’ said the girl. She slowly slid her tartan
scarf from around her neck and flicked her long,