“We’re going to have a huge problem with revenants,” Sanni adds. “Not the solo ones who just want to hide. They’ll mostly go to ground, set up a new identity, erase their memories of the war, build a new life. A whole bunch of dog-fucking criminals are going to think: Hey, I could be anyone tomorrow! And the dilemma we face is, is there really any point persecuting a former collaborator if they don’t even remember what they did anymore? I figure we’re best leaving the deserters to lie. But the organized groups are going to be a real headache. If they stay organized and hang on to their memories, they could try to start it all up again. We might be able to nail a bunch of them through traffic analysis, but what if they set up an identity remixer somewhere? If they can get lots of clean identities going into an isolated polity where they mingle with the criminals, bodies go in, bodies come out, and how would we know what’s happening in the middle? If they’re in charge of the firewall, they can play any number of tricks. A shell game.”
“So we look out for things like that,” Al suggests.
I stare at him, and force myself to wait for a couple of seconds before I open my mouth: Al isn’t always fast on the uptake. “That’s a fair description of any modern polity,” I point out. “And we haven’t consolidated control everywhere—we’ve only broken CY’s coordination capability within all the networks we’re in direct communication with. If we want to clean up, we’ve got to go further.”
“So?” Al glyphs amusement in lieu of having a face to smile with. “It’s an ongoing process. Maybe you need to think about what you’re going to do with the bad guys when you’ve rounded them up?”
14
Hospital
I hear dryness, and there’s a taste of blue in my mouth, and I have an erection. I lick my lips and find my mouth is dry and tastes like something died in it. And I don’t have an erection because I don’t have a penis to have one with. What I’ve got is a bad case of, of—memory fugue, I realize, and my eyes click open.
I’m lying between harshly starched white sheets, facing a white wall with strange sockets in it. Pale green hangings form a curtain on either side of my bed. Someone’s put me in an odd gown with a slit running right up the back. The gown is also green. This must be the hospital, I think, closing my eyes and trying not to panic. How did I get here? Trying not to panic is a nonstarter. I gasp and try to sit up.
A few seconds later the dizziness subsides and I try again. My heart’s pounding, I’m queasy, and the front of my head aches; I feel as weak as a jellyfish. Meanwhile the panic is scraping at my attention again. Who brought me here? If Yourdon finds me, he’ll kill me! There’s some kind of box with buttons on it hanging from a hook on the bed frame. I pick it up and stab a button at semirandom, and my feet come up. Other way! Ten seconds later I’m sitting up uncomfortably, the bed raised behind my back. It puts an unpleasant pressure on my stomach, but with verticality comes a minute degree of comfort—I’ve got some control over my environment—before the greater unease sneaks up on me again.
Okay, so the gardener—I trail off, my internal narrative stuck in a haze of incomprehension. It brought me here? Where is here, anyway? This bed—it’s one of a row, spaced alongside one wall in a huge, high-ceilinged white room. There’s an array of windows set high up in the opposite wall, and I can glimpse blue and white sky through it. Incomprehensible bits of equipment are dotted around. There are lockers next to some of the beds—and I see that one of the beds at the other end of the room looks to be occupied.
I close my eyes, feeling a deadweight of dread. I’m still in the glasshouse, I realize sickly.
But I’m too weak to do anything, and, besides, I’m not alone. I hear the clack of approaching heels and the sound of voices coming my way. “Hours end at four o’clock,” says a female voice with the flattening of affect I’ve come to expect of zombies. “The consultant will visit in the evening. The patient is weak and is not to be disturbed excessively.” The curtain twitches back, and I see a female zombie wearing a white dress and an odd hair adornment. The zombie looks at me. “You have a visitor,” she intones. “Do not overexert yourself.”
“Uh,” I manage to say, and try to turn my head so I can see who it is, but they’re still half-concealed behind the curtain. It’s like a nightmare, when you know some kind of monster is creeping up on you—
“Well, if it isn’t our little librarian!”
And I think, Fuck, I know that voice! And simultaneously, almost petulantly, But you can’t be here, just as Fiore steps around the curtain and leans over the rail alongside my bed, an expression of bemused condescension on his face. “Would you like to tell me where you think you were going?”
“No.” I manage to avoid gritting my teeth. “Not particularly.” The nightmare has caught up, and the well of despair is threatening to swallow me down. They’ve caught me and brought me back to play with me. I feel sick and hot.
“Come now, Reeve.” Unctuous, that’s the word. Fiore plants one plump hand on my forehead, and I realize he feels clammy and cold. “Oh dear. You are in a state.” He removes the hand before I can shake it off, and I shiver. “I can see why they brought you straight here.”
I clamp my teeth shut, waiting for the coup de grâce, but Fiore seems to have something else in mind. “I have to look after the pastoral well-being of all my flock, little lady, so I can’t stay too long with you. You’re obviously ill”—he puts some kind of odd emphasis on the word—“and I’m sure that’s the explanation for your recent erratic behavior. But next time you decide to go climbing in the walls, you should come and talk to me first”—for a moment his expression hardens—“you wouldn’t want to do anything you might regret later.”
Between shivers, I manage to roll my eyes. “I have no regrets.” Why is he playing with me?
“Come now!” Fiore clucks disapprovingly for a moment. “Of course you have regrets! To be human is to be regretful. But we must learn to make the most of what we have to work with, mustn’t we? You’ve been slow to settle in and find your place in our little parish, Reeve, and that’s been causing some concern to those of us who keep an eye on such things. I have—may I be frank?—been worried that you might be an incorrigibly disruptive influence. On the other hand, you obviously mean well, and care for your neighbors—” An unreadable expression flits across his jowls. “So I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt. Rest now, and we’ll continue our little chat later, when you’re feeling better.”
He straightens up in his portly manner and begins to turn away. I shiver again, a chill running up my spine. It’s like he doesn’t know I killed him! I realize. I can see Fiore running multiple instances of himself, but surely they’d be aware of each other, by way of their netlink? Why, doesn’t he—
“You,” I manage to say.
“Yes?”
“You.” It’s hard to form words. I’m really feeling feverish. “What’s the, the . . .”
“I don’t have all day!” His voice rises when he’s irritated, in an annoying whine. He straightens his robe. “Nurse? I say, nurse!” In a quieter voice, to me: “I’ll have them send for your husband. I’m sure you’ll have a lot to talk about.” Then he turns on his heel and bumbles away down the ward toward the other occupied beds.
I realize my teeth are chattering: I’m not sure whether from fever or black helpless rage. I killed you! And you didn’t even notice! Then the nurse comes stomping along in her sensible shoes, clutching some kind of primitive diagnostic instrument, and I realize that I’m feeling extremely unwell.
NURSE Zombie gives me a test that involves sliding a cold glass rod into my ear and staring into my eyes from close range, then she pulls out a jar and gives me what I assume at first is a piece of candy, except that it tastes vile. The hospital is set up to resemble a real dark ages installation, but luckily they seem to draw the line at leeches or heart transplants and similar barbarism. I guess this is some sort of drug, synthesized at great expense and administered to have some r
andom weird systemic effect on my metabolism. “Try to sleep,” Nurse explains to me. “You are ill.”
“C-cold,” I whisper.
“Try to sleep, you are ill.” But Nurse bends down and pulls out a loose-weave blanket. “Drink lots of fluids.” The glass on the table next to me is empty, and in any case, I feel too shivery to pull an arm out from under the blanket. “You are ill.”
No shit. It’s not just my arms and legs—all my joints are screaming at me in chorus with a whole load of muscles I wish I didn’t have right now—but my head’s throbbing and I feel like I’m freezing to death and my stomach’s not so good either. And the blackouts and memory fugues are still with me. “What’s wrong with, me?” I ask, and it takes a big effort to get the words out.
“You are ill,” the zombie repeats. It’s useless arguing with her—nobody home, no theory of mind, just a bunch of reflexes and canned dialogues.
“Who can I ask?”
She’s turning away, but I seem to have tripped a new response. “The consultant will visit at eight o’clock tonight, all questions must be addressed to the consultant. The patient is weak and must not be disturbed excessively. Drink lots of fluids.” She picks up an empty jug that was out of view a moment ago and whisks it away toward one end of the ward. A moment later she’s back with it. “Drink lots of fluids.”
“Yeah . . .” I shudder and try to work myself into a smaller volume under the blanket. I dimly realize I ought to be asking lots of questions—actually I ought to be forcing myself out of bed and running like my hair’s on fire—but right now, just pouring myself a glass of water seems like an heroic task.
I lie back and stare at the ceiling, incoherent with anger and embarrassment. Did I imagine myself killing Fiore in the library? I don’t think so; the memories are vivid. But so are all my other memories, the massacres and the endless years of war. And not all my memories are real, are they? The bootstrap memory, talking to another voice in my own larynx—if it’s not just a false memory of a false memory, then it certainly wasn’t me: It was a customized worm running on my implant. I can’t—this is getting difficult—trust myself, especially while I keep going into fugue.
“Can I?” I ask, and I open my eyes again, and Sam startles.
He’s leaning over me where Fiore was, and I realize immediately that I’ve been in fugue for some time. I’m cold, but I’m no longer feverish; the sheets are damp with sweat, and the light visible through the windows is dimming toward evening. “Reeve?” he asks anxiously.
“Sam.” I lift my hand and reach for him. He wraps my fingers in his. “I’m ill.”
“I came as soon as I heard. Fiore telephoned the office.” He sounds slightly shocky, his eyes haunted. “What happened?”
I shiver again. The damp sheets are getting to me. “Later.” Meaning: Not where the walls have ears. “Need water.” My mouth’s really dry. “I keep having fugues.”
“The nurse said something about a consultant,” says Sam. “Dr. Hanta. She said he’d be coming to look at you later. Are you going to be all right? Why are you ill?”
I clutch Sam’s hand as hard as I can. “I don’t know.” He offers me the water glass, and I swallow. “Suspect . . . not. Not sure. How long was I . . . asleep . . . for?”
“You didn’t recognize me when I came in,” Sam says. He’s holding on to my hand as if he’s afraid one of us is drowning. “You didn’t recognize me.”
“Memory fugue’s getting much worse,” I say. I lick my lips. “Three”—no, four—“today. I’m not sure why. I keep remembering stuff, but I’m not sure how much of it is real. Thought I’d”—I stop before I say killed Fiore, just in case I really did and there’s some other reason the priest doesn’t know about it—“escaped. But I woke up here.” I close my eyes. “Fiore says I’m ill.”
“What am I meant to do?” Sam asks plaintively. “How do I fix you? There’s no A-gate here . . .”
“Dark ages tech.” My hand aches from gripping him. I force it to relax. “They didn’t disassemble people and rebuild them, they used medicine, drugs, and surgery. Tried to repair damaged tissue in situ.”
“That’s insane!”
I chuckle weakly. “You’re telling me? That’s what the consultant is, he’s a doctor.” One of those weird, obsolescent words that doesn’t mean what it used to—in the real world outside this prison, a doctor is a scholar, someone who investigates stuff, not a wetware mechanic. I suppose it may have meant the same back in the real dark ages, when nobody really knew how self-replicating organisms functioned and there was an element of research involved. “I think he’s meant to figure out what’s wrong with me and repair it. Assuming they don’t just have a medical assembler down in the basement here—” I clutch his hand, because a horrible thought’s just struck me. If they’ve got a medical A-gate, won’t it be infected with Curious Yellow? “Don’t let them put me in it!”
“Put you in—what? What is it, Reeve? Reeve, are you having another fugue?”
Things are going gray around me. He leans close, and I whisper, “* * *,” in his ear. Then—
DESPERATION is the engine of necessity.
It’s two hundred megs since that committee meeting with Al and Sanni and a lot of things have changed. Me, for example: I’m not in military phenotype anymore. Neither is Sanni. We’re civilians now, corpuscles of military experience discharged into the circulating confusion of reconstruction that has become the future of Is.
I’m not used to being human again, ortho or otherwise—bits of me are missing. When the war exploded, trapping me on the MASucker for almost a generation, I was reduced to what I was carrying on my person and in my head. Then when I militarized myself, I had to let component aspects of my identity go. I’m not sure why, in all cases. Some things make sense (when at war, one’s scruples about inflicting pain and injury on the enemy faction must be suppressed), but there are gaps that follow no obvious rhyme or reason. According to my written notes from the period on the Grateful for Duration, I used to have an abiding and deep interest in baroque music of the preindustrialized age, but now I can’t recall even a scrap of melody. Again, I used to be married, with children, but I am mystified by my lack of memories from the period, or feelings. Maybe that was a reaction to grief, and maybe not—but now I’ve been demobilized, I find myself out of reaction mass and adrift along an escape vector diverging from all attachments. Only my new job retains any hold over me.
The Linebarger Cats emerged from the coalition with significant assets. To my surprise I received a credit balance that with careful management might mean I never need to work again—at least for a few gigasecs. It seems that warfare pays, if you’re on the winning side and manage not to misplace your mind in the process.
When I left MilSpace (a convoluted process involving numerous anonymous remixer networks and one-way censorship gates to strip me of my military modules before my reintegration into civil society), I had myself reassembled as a louche young man in the Cognitive Republic of Lichtenstein. There’s a lot to be said for being louche, especially after you’ve spent several hundred megaseconds with no genitals.
Lichtenstein is a vivid and cynical colony of artistic satirists, so sophisticated they’ve almost circled back into primitivism. By convention we use visual field filters that limn everything in dark strokes, filling our bodies with color. Life aspires toward a state of machinima. It’s a strange way to be, but familiar and comfortable after the unsleeping hyperspectral awareness of a tankie. So I hang around in the galleries and salons of Lichtenstein, exchanging witty repartee and tall stories with the other habitués, and in my copious free time I pay frequent trips to the bathhouses and floataria. I make a point of never sleeping with the same person twice in the same body, although I discover that even such anonymous abandon doesn’t protect me from my lovers’ tears: It seems half the population have lost someone and are wandering, searching the world over.
My life is outwardly directionless for the first fo
ur or five megs. In private I work on something that might eventually turn out to be a memoir of the war—an old-fashioned serialized text provocatively promoting a single viewpoint, without any pretense at objectivity—while in public I live on my savings. DeMob gave me a reasonably secure cover identity as a playboy remittance man from a primogeniture polity, sent to while away his youth in less hidebound (and politically loaded) biomes, and it’s not hard to keep up appearances. But deep down, the insignificance and lack of meaning of such a life chafes; I want to be doing something, and while the project I’ve been working on under Sanni’s auspices for the past couple of years fits the bill, it is, perforce, anonymous. If I make a mark, it will be by my deeds, not my name. And so, as my debauch intensifies, I slip into a kind of melancholic haze.
Then one morning I am awakened by a brassy flare of trumpets from the bedside orrery, which announces that I have a visitor.
I realize who and where I am—and that I am desperately sick—at the exact moment that Dr. Hanta presses a small, freezing cold brass disk against the bare skin between my breasts. “Ow!”
“Breathe slowly,” she orders, not unkindly, then blinks like a sleepy owl from behind her thick-lensed glasses: “Ah, back in the realm of the conscious, are we?”
By way of an answer I go into a hoarse coughing fit, my muscles locking in spasms that leave my ribs aching. Hanta recoils slightly, removing the stethoscope. “I see,” she says. “I’ll just wait a moment—glass of water?”
I realize she’s jacked the back of my bed up as the coughing subsides. “Yes. Please.” I’m shivery and weak but not freezing anymore. She holds out a glass, and I manage to accept it without spilling anything, although my hand shakes alarmingly. “What’s wrong with me?”
Glasshouse Page 27
