Glasshouse

by Charles Stross

  Blondie takes the opening, and I just barely block her, because she’s fast. But she’s not sly, and she certainly wasn’t expecting the knife in my left hand—taped to my left thigh before—and as she tries to guard against it, I see my chance and run my sword through her belly.

  She drops her weapon and falls to her knees. I sit down heavily opposite her, almost collapsing. Oh dear. How did she manage to get my leg? Maybe I shouldn’t trust my instincts quite so totally.

  “Done?” I ask, suddenly feeling faint.

  “I—” There’s a curious expression on her face as she holds on to the basket of my sword. “Uh.” She tries to swallow. “Who?”

  “I’m Robin,” I say lightly, watching her with interest. I’m not sure I’ve ever watched somebody dying with a sword through their guts before. There’s lots of blood and a really vile smell of ruptured intestines. I’d have thought she’d be writhing and screaming, but maybe she’s got an autonomic override. Anyway, I’m busy holding my leg together. Blood keeps welling up between my fingers. Comradeship in pain. “You are . . . ?”

  “Gwyn.” She swallows. The light of hatred is extinguished, leaving something—puzzlement?—behind.

  “When did you last back up, Gwyn?”

  She squints. “Unh. Hour. Ago.”

  “Well then. Would you like me to end this?”

  It takes a moment for her to meet my eyes. She nods. “When? You?”

  I lean over, grimacing, and pick up her blade. “When did I last back myself up? Since recovering from memory surgery, you mean?”

  She nods, or maybe shudders. I raise the blade and frown, lining it up on her neck: it takes all my energy. “Good question—”

  I slice through her throat. Blood sprays everywhere.

  “Never.”

  I stumble to the exit—an A-gate—and tell it to rebuild my leg before returning me to the bar. It switches me off, and a subjective instant later, I wake up in the kiosk in the washroom at the back of the bar, my body remade as new. I stare into the mirror for about a minute, feeling empty but, curiously, at peace with myself. Maybe I’ll be ready for a backup soon? I flex my right leg. The assembler’s done a good job of canonicalizing it, and the edited muscle works just fine. I resolve to avoid Gwyn, at least until she’s in a less insensately violent mood, which may take a long time if she keeps picking fights with her betters. Then I return to my table.

  Kay is still there, which is odd. I’d expected her to be gone by now. (A-gates are fast, but it still takes a minimum of about a thousand seconds to tear down and rebuild a human body: that’s a lot of bits and atoms to juggle.)

  I drop into my seat. She has bought me another drink. “I’m sorry about that,” I say automatically.

  “You get used to it around here.” She sounds philosophical. “Feeling better?”

  “You know, I—” I stop. Just for a moment I’m back in that dusty concrete-strewn wasteland, a searing pain in my leg, the sheer hatred I feel fueling my throw at Gwyn’s head. “It’s gone,” I say. I stare at the glass, then pick it up and knock back half of it in one go.

  “What’s gone?” I catch her watching me. “If you don’t mind talking about it,” she adds hastily.

  She’s frightened but concerned, I suddenly realize. My parole ring pulses warmth repeatedly. “I don’t mind,” I say, and smile, probably a trifle tiredly. I put the glass down. “I’m still in the dissociative phase, I guess. Before I came out this evening I was sitting in my room all on my own, and I was drawing pretty lines all over my arms with a scalpel. Thinking about opening my wrists and ending it all. I was angry. Angry at myself. But now I’m not.”

  “That’s very common.” Her tone is guarded. “What changed it for you?”

  I frown. Knowing it’s a common side effect of reintegration doesn’t help. “I’ve been an idiot. I need to take a backup as soon as I go home.”

  “A backup?” Her eyes widen. “You’ve been walking around here wearing a sword and a dueling sash all evening, and you don’t have a backup?” Her voice rises to a squeak. “What are you trying to do?”

  “Knowing you’ve got a backup blunts your edge. Anyway, I was angry with myself.” I stop frowning as I look at her. “But you can’t stay angry forever.”

  More to the point, I’m suddenly feeling an awful, hollow sense of dread about the idea of rediscovering who I am, or who I used to be. What does it mean, to suddenly begin sensing other people’s emotions again only after you run someone through with a sword? Back in the dark ages it would have been a tragedy. Even here, dying isn’t something most people take lightly. For a horrible moment I feel the urge to rush out and find Gwyn and apologize to her—but that’s absurd, she won’t remember, she’ll be in the same headspace she was in before. She’d probably challenge me to another duel and, being in the same insensate rage, turn me into hamburger on the spot.

  “I think I’m reconnecting,” I say slowly. “Do you know somewhere I could go that’s safer? I mean, less likely to attract the attentions of berserkers?”

  “Hmm.” She looks at me critically. “If you lose the sword and the sash, you won’t look out of place round the block in one of the phase two recovery piazzas. I know a place that does a really good joesteak—how hungry are you feeling?”

  IN the wake of the duel I have become hungry for food just as my appetite for violence has declined. Kay takes me to a charmingly rustic low-gee piazza of spun-diamond foam and bonsai redwoods, where quaint steam-powered robots roast succulent baby hams over charcoal grills. Kay and I chat and it becomes clear that she’s mightily intrigued to see me recovering visibly from the emotional aftereffects of memory surgery. I pump her for details of life among the ice ghouls, and she quizzes me about the dueling academies of the Invisible Republic. She has a quirky sense of humor and, toward the end of the meal, suggests that she knows a party where there’s fun to be had.

  The party turns out to be a fairly laid-back floating orgy in one of the outpatient apartments. There are only about six people there when we arrive, mostly lying on the large circular bed, passing around a water pipe and masturbating each other tenderly. Kay leans me up against the wall just beside the entrance, kisses me, and does something electrifying to my perineum and testicles with three of her hands. Then she vanishes into the hygiene suite to use the assembler, leaving me panting. When she returns I almost don’t recognize her—her hair has turned blue, she’s lost two arms, and her skin has turned the color of milky coffee. But she walks right up to me and kisses me again and I recognize her by the taste of her mouth. I carry her to the bed and, after our first urgent fuck, we join the circle with the pipe—which is loaded with opium and an easily vaporized phosphodiesterase inhibitor—then explore each other’s bodies and those of our neighbors until we’re close to falling asleep.

  I’m lying next to her, almost face-to-face, when she murmurs, “That was fun.”

  “Fun,” I echo. “I needed—” My vision blurs. “Too long.”

  “I come here regularly,” she offers. “You?”

  “I haven’t—” I pause.

  “What?”

  “I can’t remember when I last had sex.”

  She places one hand between my thighs. “Really?” She looks puzzled.

  “I can’t.” I frown. “I must have forgotten it.”

  “Forgotten? Truly?” She looks surprised. “Could you have had a bad relationship or something? Could that be why you had surgery?”

  “No, I—” I stop before anything more slips out. The letter from my older self would have said if that was the case, I’m certain of that much. “It’s just gone. I don’t think that usually happens, does it?”

  “No.” She cuddles up against me and strokes my neck. I feel a momentary sense of wonder as I stiffen against her, then I begin to trace the edges of her nipples, and her breath catches. It must be the drugs, I think; I couldn’t possibly stay aroused this long without some external input, could I? “You’d be a good subject fo
r Yourdon’s experiment.”

  “Yourdon’s what?”

  She pushes at my chest and I roll onto my back obligingly to let her mount me. There are toys scattered round the bed, mewing and begging to be used, but she seems to need to do this the traditional way, bareback skin on skin: she probably sees it as a way of reconnecting with what it means to be human or something. My breath hisses as I grab her buttocks and pull her down onto me.

  “The experiment. He’s looking for serious amnesia cases, offering a referral fee to finders. I’ll tell you later.”

  And then we stop talking, because speech is simply getting in the way of communication, and in the here and now, she’s all I need.

  AFTERWARD, I walk home through avenues carpeted with soft, living grass, roofed in green marble slabs carved from the lithosphere of a planet hundreds of teraklicks away. I am alone with my thoughts, netlink silenced save for a route map that promises me a five-kilometer walk avoiding all other persons. Though I carry my sword, I don’t feel any desire to be challenged. I need time to think, because when I get home my therapist will be waiting for me, and I need to be clear in my own head about who I think I am becoming before I talk to it.

  Here I am, awake and alive—whoever I am. I’m Robin, aren’t I? I have a slew of fuzzy memories, traces left behind by memory washes that blur my earlier lives into an impressionist haze. I had to look up my own age shortly after I woke. Turns out I’m nearly seven billion seconds old, though I have the emotional stability of a postadolescent a tenth that age. Once upon a time people who lived even two gigaseconds were senescent. How can I be so old yet feel so young and inexperienced?

  There are huge, mysterious holes in my life. Obviously I must have had sex before, but I don’t remember it. Clearly I have dueled—my reflexes and unconscious skills made short work of Gwyn—but I don’t remember training, or killing, except in mysterious flashes that could equally well be leftover memories of entertainments. The letter from my earlier self said I was an academic, a military historian specializing in religious manias, sleeper cults, and emergent dark ages. If so, I don’t remember any of it at all. Maybe it’s buried deep, to re-emerge when I need it—and maybe it’s gone for good. Whatever grade of memory excision my earlier self requested must have been perilously close to a total wipe.

  So what’s left?

  There are fractured shards of memory all over the lobby of my Cartesian theatre, waiting for me to slip and cut myself on them. I’m in male orthohuman form right now, orthodox product of natural selection. This shape feels right to me, but I think there was a time when I was something much stranger—for some reason, I have the idea that I might have been a tank. (Either that, or I mainlined one too many wartime adventure virtches, and they stuck with me through memory surgery even when more important parts went missing.) The sense of implacable extensibility, coldly controlled violence . . . yes, maybe I was a tank. If so, at one time I guarded a critical network gate. Traffic between polities, like traffic within a polity, passes over T-gates, point-to-point wormholes linking distant locations. T-gates have two endpoints, and are unfiltered—anything can pass through one, from one end to the other. While this isn’t a problem within a polity, it’s a huge problem when you’re defending a network frontier against attack from other polities. Hence the firewall. My job, as part of the frontier guard, was to make sure that inbound travelers went straight into an A-gate—an assembler array that disassembled, uploaded, and analyzed them for threats, before routing them as serial data to another A-gate on the inside of the DMZ for reassembly. Normally people would only be routed through an A-gate for customs scanning or serialization via a high-traffic wormhole aperture dedicated to data traffic; but at that time there were no exceptions to the security check because we were at war.

  War? Yes: it was the tail end of the censorship wars. I must have been infected at some point because I can’t remember what it was about, but I was definitely guarding cross-border—longjump—T-gates for one of the successor states that splintered from the Republic of Is when its A-gates were infected by the redactionist worms.

  And then I seem to faintly recall . . . yes! Once upon a time I was one of the Linebarger Cats. Or I worked for them. But I wasn’t a tank, then. I was something else.

  I step out of a T-gate at one end of a musty-smelling corridor running through the stony heart of a ruined cathedral. Huge pillars rise toward a black sky on either side of me, ivy crawling across the latticework screens that block off the gaps between them. (The pillars are a necessary illusion, markers for the tunnel field that holds in the atmosphere; the planet beneath this gothic park is icy cold and airless, tidally locked to a brown dwarf primary somewhere in transsolar space within a few hundred trillion kilometers of legendary dead Urth.) I walk across decaying tapestries of crimson-and-turquoise wool, armored and gowned orthohumans fighting and loving across a gulf of seconds so vast that my own history dims into insignificance.

  Here I am, stranded at the far end of time in a rehabilitation center run by the hospitaler surgeon-confessors of the Invisible Republic, pacing the abandoned halls of a picturesque folly on the surface of a brown dwarf planet as I try to piece together my unraveled identity. I can’t even remember how I got here. So how am I meant to talk to my therapists?

  I follow the blinking cursor of my netlink map into a central atrium, then hang a left into a nave that leads past stone altars topped with the carved skeletons of giants. The nave leads shortly to a rectangular hole in space delineated by another T-gate. Stepping through the wormhole, I feel light-footed: gravity here declines to hold me, and there is a pronounced Coriolis force tugging toward my left. The light is brighter, and the floor is a blue liquid lake with surface tension so high that I can skate along it, my feet dimpling the surface. There are no doors at water level but niches and irregular hollows cut into the walls, and the air carries a tang of iodine. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say this route was leading through a chamber in one of the enigmatic routers that orbit so many brown dwarfs in this part of the galaxy.

  At the end of the corridor I pass several moving human-sized clouds—privacy haze fuzzing out the other travelers so that we do not have to notice each other—and then into another chamber, with a ring of T-gate wormholes and A-gate routers circling the wall. I take the indicated door and find myself in a familiar-looking corridor paneled to either side in living wood, an ornamental fountain occupying the courtyard at the far end. It’s peaceful and friendly, lit with the warm glow of a yellow star. This is where I, and a handful of other rehabilitation subjects, have been assigned apartments. This is where we can come to socialize safely with people in the same state of recovery, when it is safe for us to do so. And this is where I come to meet my therapist.

  TODAY’S therapist isn’t remotely humanoid, not even bushujo or elven; Piccolo-47 is a mesomorphic drone, roughly pear-shaped, with a variety of bizarre-looking extensible robot limbs—some of them not physically connected to Piccolo’s body—and nothing that resembles a face. Personally, I think that’s rude (humans are hardwired at a low level to use facial expressions to communicate emotional states: Not wearing a face in public is a deliberate snub), but I keep the thought to myself. It’s probably doing it on purpose to see how stable I am—if I can’t cope with someone who doesn’t have a face, how am I going to manage in public? Anyway, picking fights with my counselor is not going to help my emotional wobbles. I’m tired, and I’d like to have a long bath and go to sleep, so I resolve to get this over without any unpleasant incidents.

  “You fought a duel today,” says Piccolo-47. “Please describe the events leading up to the incident in your own words.”

  I sit down on the stone steps beneath the fountain, lean back until I can feel the cool splashing of water on the back of my neck, and try to tell myself that I’m talking to a household appliance. That helps. “Sure,” I say, and summarize the diurn’s events—at least, the public ones.

  “Do you feel that Gwyn
provoked you unduly?” asks the counselor.

  “Hmm.” I think about it for a moment. “I think I may have provoked her,” I say slowly. “Not intentionally, but she caught me watching her, and I could probably have disengaged. If I’d wanted to.” The admission makes me feel slightly dirty—but only slightly. Gwyn is walking around right now with no memory of having been stabbed in the guts. She’s lost less than an hour of her lifeline. Whereas my leg is still giving me twinges of memory, and I risked—

  “You said you have not taken a backup. Isn’t that a little foolhardy?”

  “Yes, yes it is.” I make up my mind. “And I’m going to take one as soon as we finish this conversation.”

  “Good.” I startle slightly and stare at Piccolo-47, disturbed. Therapists don’t normally express opinions, positive or negative, during a session; it’s just broken the illusion that it’s not there, and I feel my skin crawl slightly as I look at its smooth carapace. “Examination of your public state suggests that you are progressing well. I encourage you to continue exploring the rehabilitative sector and to make use of the patient support groups.”

  “Um.” I stare. “I thought you weren’t meant to intervene . . . ?”

  “Intervention is contraindicated in early stages of recovery of patients with severe dissociative psychopathology consequential to memory excision. However, in later stages, it may be used where appropriate to provide guidance for a patient who is showing significant progress.” Then Piccolo-47 pauses. “I would like to make a request. You are free to disregard it.”

  “Oh?” I stare at its dorsal manipulator root. It’s something like an iridescent cauliflower, flexing and shimmering and breathing, and something like a naked lung, turned inside out and electroplated with titanium. It’s fascinatingly abhuman, a macroscopic nanomachine so complex it seems almost alive in its own right.

  “You said that Patient Kay mentioned the Yourdon experiment to you. Historian Professor Yourdon is one of my coworkers, and Kay is perfectly correct. Your relatively deep therapy means that you would be an ideal participant for the project. I also believe that your long-term recovery may benefit from participation.”