Glasshouse

by Charles Stross

  Incidentally, one of the things you’ll find in the imprint is the memory of how to access a trust fund with a quarter million écus in it.

  (Yes, I’m a manipulative worm: I want you to become me again, sooner or later. Don’t worry, you’re a manipulative worm, too—you must be, if you’re alive to read this letter.)

  Now, the basics.

  You are recovering from deep memory erasure surgery. You are probably thinking that once you recover you’ll go and spend the usual wanderjahr looking for a vocation, find somewhere to live, meet friends and lovers, and set up a life for yourself. Wrong. The reason you are recovering from memory erasure surgery is that the people you work for have noticed a disturbing pattern of events centered on the Clinic of the Blessed Singularity run by the order of surgeon-confessors at City Zone Darke in the Invisible Republic. People coming out of surgery are being offered places in a psychological/historical research project aimed at probing the social conditions of the first dark age by live role-play. Some of these people have very questionable histories: in some cases, questionable to the point of being fugitive war criminals.

  Your mission (and no, you don’t have any choice—I already committed us to it) is to go inside the YFH-Polity, find out what’s going on, then come back out to tell us. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

  There’s a catch. The research community has been established inside a former military prison, a glasshouse that was used as a reprogramming and rehabilitation center after the war. It was widely believed to be escape-proof at the time, and it’s certainly a very secure facility. Other agents have already gone in. One very experienced colleague of yours vanished completely, and is now over twenty megs past their criticality deadline. Another reappeared eleven megaseconds late, reported to the prearranged debriefing node, and detonated a concealed antimatter device, killing the instance of their case officer who was in attendance.

  I believe that both agents were compromised because they were injected into the glasshouse with extensive prebriefing and training. We have no idea what to expect on the other side of the longjump gate into YFH-Polity, but their security is tight. We expect extensive border firewalls and a focused counterespionage operation supported by the surveillance facilities of a maximum-security prison. There is likely to be stateful examination of your upload vector, and careful background checks before you are admitted. This is why I am about to undergo deep memory excision. Simply put, what you don’t know can’t betray you.

  Incidentally, if you’re experiencing lucid dreams about this stuff, it means you’re overdue. This is the secondary emergent fallback briefing. I’m about to have these memories partially erased—unlinked, but not destroyed—before I go into the clinic in City Zone Darke. It’s a matter of erasing the associative links to the data, not the data itself. They’ll re-emerge given sufficient time, hopefully even after the surgeon-confessors go after the other memories that I’ll be asking them to redact. They can’t erase what I don’t know I’ve already forgotten.

  What is the background to your mission?

  I can tell you very little. Our records are worryingly incomplete, and to some extent this is a garbage trawl triggered by the coincidence of the names Yourdon, Fiore, and Hanta cropping up in the same place.

  During the censorship wars, Curious Yellow infected virtually every A-gate in the Republic of Is. We don’t know who released Curious Yellow, or why, because Curious Yellow appears to have been created for the sole purpose of delivering a psywar payload designed to erase all memories and data pertaining to something or other. By squatting the assemblers, Curious Yellow ensured that anyone who needed medical care, food, material provisions, or just about any of the necessities of civilization, had to submit to censorship. Needless to say, some of us took exception to this, and the subsequent civil war—in which the Republic of Is shattered into the current system of firewalled polities—resulted in a major loss of data about certain key areas. In particular, the key services provided by the Republic—a common time framework and the ability to authenticate identities—were broken. The situation was complicated, after the defeat of the Curious Yellow censorship worm, by the emergence of quisling dictatorships whose leaders took advantage of the Curious Yellow software to spread their own pernicious ideologies and power structures. In the ensuing chaos, even more information was lost.

  Among the things we know very little about are the history and origins of certain military personnel conscripted into sleeper cells by Curious Yellow once the worm determined it was under attack by dissidents armed with clean, scratch-built A-gates. The same goes for the dangerous opportunists who took advantage of Curious Yellow’s payload capability in order to set up their own pocket empires. Yourdon, Fiore, and Hanta came to our attention in connection with the psychological warfare organizations of no less than eighteen local cognitive dictatorships. They are extraordinarily dangerous people, but they are currently beyond our reach because they are, to put it bluntly, providing some kind of service to the military of the Invisible Republic.

  What we know about the sleeper cells is this: In the last few megasecs of the war, before the alliance succeeded in shattering and then sanitizing the last remaining networks of Curious Yellow, some of the quisling dictatorships’ higher echelons went underground. It is now almost two gigaseconds since the end of the war, and most people dismiss the concept of Curious Yellow revenants as fantasy. However, I don’t believe in ignoring threats just because they sound far-fetched. If Curious Yellow really did create sleeper cells, secondary pockets of infection designed to break out long after the initial wave was suppressed, then our collective failure to pursue them is disastrously shortsighted. And I am particularly worried because some aspects of the YFH-Polity experimental protocol, as published, sound alarmingly amenable to redirection along these lines.

  My biggest reason for wanting you to have undergone major memory erasure prior to injection into YFH-Polity is this: I suspect that when the incoming experimental subjects are issued with new bodies, they are filtered through an A-gate infected with a live, patched copy of Curious Yellow. Therefore preemptive memory redaction is the only sure way of preventing such a verminiferous gate from identifying you as a threat for its owners to eliminate.

  I watch myself writing this letter to myself. I can read it as clearly as if it’s engraved in my own flesh. But I can’t see any marks in the paper, because my old self has forgotten to dip his pen in the ink, and he’s long since fallen to scratching invisible indentations on the coarse sheets. I seem to stand behind his shoulder although his head is nowhere in my field of vision, and I try to scream at him, No! No! That isn’t how you do it! But nothing comes out because this is a dream, and when I try to grab the pen, my hand passes right through his wrist, and he keeps writing on my naked brain with his ink of blood and neurotransmitters.

  I begin to panic, because being trapped in this cell with him has brought memories flooding back in, memories that he cunningly suppressed in order to avoid triggering Curious Yellow’s redaction factories. It’s a movable feast of horrors and exultation and life in the large. It’s too much to bear, and it’s too intense, because now I remember the rest of my earlier dream of swords and armor and the reversible massacre aboard a conditionally liberated polity cylinder. I remember the way our A-gate glitched and crashed at the end of the rescue as we threw the last severed head into its maw, and the way Loral turned to me, and said, “Well shit,” in a voice full of world-weary disgust, and how I walked away and scheduled myself for deep erasure because I knew if I didn’t, the memory of it all would drag me awake screaming for years to come—

  —And I’m awake, and I make it to the toilet just in time before my stomach squeezes convulsively and tries to climb up my throat and escape.

  I can’t believe I did those things. I don’t believe I would have committed such crimes. But I remember the massacre as if it was yesterday. And if those memories are false, then what about the rest of me?

  NO
T entirely by coincidence, the next day is my first run with the shoulder bag. It started life as a rectangular green vinyl affair. It now sports a black nylon lining that I’ve stitched together with much swearing and sucking of pricked fingertips to conceal the gleaming copper weave glued to its inside. It looks like a shopping bag until I fold over the inner flap. Then it looks like a full shopping bag with a black flap covering the contents. Right now it contains a carton of extremely strong ground espresso, a filter cone, and several small items that are individually innocuous but collectively damning if you know what you’re looking at. It’s a good thing the bag looks anonymous, because unless I’m hallucinating all my memories, what I’m going to take home from work in that bag today will be a whole lot less innocuous than coffee beans.

  I get in to work at the usual early hour and find Janis in the staff room, looking pale and peaky. “Morning sickness?” I ask. She nods. “Sympathies. Say, why don’t you stay here, and I’ll get the returns sorted out? Put your feet up—I’ll call you if anything comes up that I can’t handle.”

  “Thanks. I’ll do just that.” She leans back against the wall. “I wouldn’t be here but Fiore’s coming—”

  “You leave that to me,” I say, trying not to look surprised. I wasn’t expecting him so soon, but I’ve got the bag, so . . .

  “Are you sure?” she asks.

  “Yes.” I smile reassuringly. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll just let him in and leave him to get on with things.”

  “Okay,” she says gratefully, and I go back out and get to work.

  First I pile yesterday’s returns on the trolley and push them around the shelves, filing them as fast as I can. It only takes a few minutes—most of the inmates here don’t realize that reading is a recreational option, and only a handful are borrowing regularly. But then I skip the dusting and cleaning I’m supposed to do today. Instead, I grab my bag from behind the reception station, dump it on the bottom shelf of the trolley, and head for the shelves in the reference section next to the room where the Church documents are stored.

  Into the bag goes a dictionary of sexual taboos, held in the reference shelves because some weird interpretation of dark age mores holds that libraries wouldn’t lend such stuff out. It’s my cover story in case I’m caught, something naughty but obviously trivial. Then I leave the trolley right where it is with the bag tucked away on the bottom shelf, where it’s not immediately obvious. I head back to the front desk. My palms are sweating. Fiore is due to visit the archive, which means advancing my plans. Janis has always handled him before—but she’s ill, I’m running the shop, and there’s no point delaying the inevitable. I’ve got all my excuses prepared, anyway. I’ve barely been able to sleep lately for rehearsing them in my head.

  Around midmorning a black car pulls up and parks in front of the library steps. I put down the book I’m reading and stand up to wait behind the counter. A uniformed zombie gets out of the front and opens the rear door, standing to one side while a plump male climbs out. His dark, oily hair shines in the daylight: The white slash of his clerical collar lends his face a disembodied appearance, as if it doesn’t quite belong to the same world as the rest of his body. He walks up the steps to the front door and pushes it open, then walks over to the desk. “Special reference section,” he says tersely. Then he looks at my face. “Ah, Reeve. I didn’t see you here before.”

  I manage a sickly smile. “I’m the trainee librarian. Janis is ill this morning, so I’m looking after everything in her absence.”

  “Ill?” He stares at me owlishly. I look right back at him. Fiore has chosen a body that is physically imposing but bordering on senescence, in the state the ancients called “middle age.” He’s overweight to the point of obesity, squat and wide and barely taller than I am. His chins wobble as he talks, and the pores on his nose are very visible. Right now his nostrils are flared, sniffing the air suspiciously, and his bushy eyebrows draw together as he inspects me. He smells of something musty and organic, as if he’s spent too long in a compost heap.

  “Yes, she has morning sickness,” I say artlessly, hoping he won’t ask where she is.

  “Morning sick—oh, I see!” His frown vanishes instantly. “Ah, the trials we have to suffer.” His voice oozes a slug-trail of sympathy. “I’m sure this must be hard for her, and for you. Just take me to the reference room, and I’ll stay out of your way, child.”

  “Certainly.” I head for the gate at the side of the station. “If you’d like to follow me?” He knows exactly where we’re going, the old toad, but he’s a stickler for appearances. I lead him to the locked door in the reference section, and he produces a small bunch of keys, muttering to himself, and opens it. “Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?” I ask hesitantly.

  He pauses and gives me the dead-fish stare again. “Isn’t that against library regulations?” he asks.

  “Normally yes, but you’re not going to be in the library proper,” I babble, “you’re in the archive and you’re a responsible person so I thought I’d offer—”

  He stops being interested in me. “Coffee will be fine. Milk, no sugar.” He disappears into the room, leaving his keys with the lock.

  Now. Heart pounding, I head for the staff room. Janis is snoozing when I open the door. She sits up with a start, looking pale. “Reeve—”

  “It’s all right,” I say, crossing over to the kettle and filling it up. “Fiore’s here, I let him in. Listen, why don’t you go home? If you’re feeling ill, you shouldn’t really be here, should you?”

  “I’ve been thinking about thinking.” Janis shakes her head. I rummage around for the coffee and filter papers and set the stand up over the biggest mug I can find. I scoop the coffee into the paper with wild abandon, stopping only when I realize that making it too strong for Fiore will be as bad as not getting him to drink it all. “You shouldn’t think too much, Reeve. It’s bad for you.”

  “Is it really?” I ask abstractedly, as I peel the foil wrapping from a small tablet of chocolate I bought at the drugstore and crumble half of it into the coffee grounds as the kettle begins to hiss. I wad the foil into a tight ball and flick it into the wastebasket.

  “If you think about getting out of here,” says Janis.

  “Like I said, I’ll call you a taxi—”

  “No, I mean out of here.” I turn round and she looks at me with the expression of a trapped animal. It’s one of those moments of existential bleakness when the cocoon of lies that we spin around ourselves to paper over the cracks in reality dissolve into slime, and we’re left looking at something really ugly. Janis has got the bug, the same one I’ve got, only she’s got it worse. “I can’t stand it anymore! They’re going to put me in hospital and make me pass a skull through my cunt, and then they’re going to have a little accident and I’ll bleed out and they’ll give me to Hanta to fix with her tame censorship worm. I’ll come out of the hospital smiling like Yvonne and Patrice, and there won’t be any me left, there’ll be this thing that thinks it’s me and—”

  I grab her. “Shut up!” I hiss in her ear. “It’s not going to happen!” She sobs, a great racking howl welling up inside her, and if she lets it out. I’m completely screwed because Fiore will hear us. “I’ve got a plan.”

  “You’ve—what?”

  The kettle is boiling. I gently push away her groping hands and reach over to turn it off. “Listen. Go home. Right now, right this instant. Leave Fiore to me. Stop panicking. The more isolated we think we are, the more isolated we become. I won’t let them mess with your head.” I smile at her reassuringly. “Trust me.”

  “You.” Janis sniffles loudly, then lets go of me and grabs a tissue off the box on the table. “You’ve got—no, don’t tell me.” She blows her nose and takes a deep breath, then looks at me again, a long, hard, appraising look. “Should have guessed. You don’t take shit, do you?”

  “Not if I can help it.” I pick up the kettle and carefully pour boiling water into the funnel, where it will dam
p down the coffee grounds, extract the xanthine alkaloids and dissolve the half tab of Ex-Lax hidden in the powder, draining the sennoside glycosides and the highly diuretic caffeine into the mug of steaming coffee that, with any luck, will give Fiore a strong urge to take ten minutes on the can about half an hour after he drinks it. “Just try to relax. I should be able to tell you about it in a couple of days if things work out.”

  “Right. You’ve got a plan.” She blows her nose again. “You want me to go home.” It’s a question.

  “Yes. Right now, without letting Fiore see you here—I told him you were at home, sick.”

  “Okay.” She manages a wan smile.

  I pour milk into the coffee mug, then pick it up. “I’m just going to give the Reverend his coffee,” I tell her.

  “To give—” Her eyes widen. “I see.” She takes her jacket from the hook on the back of the door. “I’d better get out of your way, then.” She grins at me briefly. “Good luck!”

  And she’s gone, leaving me room to pick up the mug of coffee and the other item from the sink side and to carry them out to Fiore.

  THE simplest plans are often the best.

  Anything I try to do on the library computer system will be monitored, and the instant I try to find anything interesting they’ll know I know about it. It’s probably there as a honeypot, to snare the overly curious and insufficiently paranoid. Even if it isn’t, I probably won’t get anywhere useful—those old conversational interfaces are not only arcane, they’re feeble-minded.

  To put one over on these professional paranoids is going to take skill, cunning, and lateral thinking. And my thinking is this: If Fiore and the Bishop Yourdon and their fellow experimenters have one weak spot, it’s their dedication to the spirit of the study. They won’t use advanced but anachronistic surveillance techniques where nonintrusive ones that were available during the dark ages will do. And they won’t use informational metastructures accessible via netlink where a written manual and records on paper will do. (Either that, or what they write on paper really is secret stuff, material that they won’t entrust to a live data system in case it comes under attack.)