“That’s what I’m here to find out.” Hanta is a petite female, shorter than I am, her skin a shade darker, although not the aubergine-tinted brown of Fiore. Her short hair is dusted with the silver spoor of impending senescence, and there are laugh-lines around her face. She wears an odd white overcoat buttoned up the front and carries the arcane totems of her profession, the caduceus and stethoscope—the bell of the latter she rubs upon my chest. She looks friendly and open and trustworthy, the antithesis of her two clerical colleagues: but beauty is not truth, and some gut instinct tells me never to let my guard down in her presence. “How long have you been febrile?”
“Febrile?”
“Hot and cold. Chills, shivers, alternating with too hot. Night sweats, anything like that.”
“Oh, about—” I feel my forehead wrinkling. “What day is it? How long have I been in here?”
“You’ve been here six hours,” Dr. Hanta says patiently. “You were brought in around midafternoon.”
I shiver convulsively. My skin is icy. “Since an hour or two before then.”
“The Reverend Doctor Fiore tells me you were climbing.” Her tone is neutral, professional, with no note of censure.
I swallow. “Since then.”
“You’re a lucky lady.” Hanta smiles enigmatically and moves her stethoscope to the ball of my left shoulder, pulling open my hospital gown to get at it. “I’m sorry, I’ll be quick. Hmm.” She stares into the stethoscope’s eye crystal and frowns. “It’s a long time since I’ve seen that . . . sorry.” She straightens up. “It’s not safe to climb around in the walls here; some of the neighboring biomes aren’t biomorphically integrated. There are replicators in the mass fraction reserve cells that will eat anything based on a nucleotide chassis that doesn’t broadcast a contact inhibition signal, and you’re not equipped for that.”
I swallow again—my mouth is unnaturally dry. “What?”
“Somehow or other you’ve managed to get yourself infected with a strain of pestis mechaniculorum. You’re feverish because your immune system is still just about containing it. It’s a good thing for you that we found you before mechanotic cytolysis set in . . . Anyway, I’ll fix you up just as soon as I finish sequencing it.”
“Um.” I shudder again. “Oh, okay.”
“ ‘Okay’ indeed. Do I have to tell you not to go climbing around inside the walls again?” I shake my head, almost embarrassed by my own fear of discovery. “Good.” She pats me on the shoulder. “At least if you’re going to do it again, come to me first, please? No more unfortunate accidents.” She carefully disconnects the stethoscope and wraps it around her caduceus. It makes soft clicking noises as it fuses with the staff. “Now I’ll just run you off a little antirobotic, and you’ll be up and about in no time.”
Dr. Hanta hitches up her coat, then perches on a stool next to my bed. “Isn’t this a bit out of character?” I ask her, throwing caution to the winds. I suspect if I asked Fiore or Yourdon that question, they’d bite my head off, but Hanta seems more approachable, if not more trustworthy.
“We all make mistakes.” It’s that smile again: It’s slightly fey and very sincere, as if she’s laughing at a joke that I’d laugh along with, if I only knew what it was. “You leave worrying about the integrity of the experiment to me, dear.” She waves a dismissive hand. “Of course you worry about it when the priests’ backs are turned. Of course people try to game the system—it’s only to be expected. Probably some people don’t even want to be here. Maybe they changed their minds after signing the waiver. All I can say is, we’ll do our best to make sure they’re not unhappy with the outcome.” She raises an eyebrow at me speculatively. “It’s not easy to run an experiment on this scale, and we make mistakes, what else can I say? Some of us make more mistakes than others.” And now she pulls an expression of mild distaste, which seems to say it all. She’s inviting my agreement, and I find myself nodding along despite my better judgment.
“But those mistakes . . .” I stop, unsure if I should continue.
“Yes?” She leans forward.
“How’s Cass?” I force myself to ask.
Dr. Hanta’s face, which up until now has been open and friendly, closes like a trapdoor. “Why do you ask?”
I lick my lips again. “I need something to drink.” She slides off her stool and paces round my bed, pours what’s left of the water jug into my cup, and hands it to me without a word. I swallow. “One of Fiore’s little mistakes, I suppose.” I aim to say it lightly, but it comes out dripping with sarcasm.
“Oh yes.” Dr. Hanta looks round, toward the far end of the ward—at something hidden from me by the curtain. I shudder, and this time it’s not from the fever chills. “I wouldn’t say one of his little mistakes.” Her tone of voice is dry, but there’s something behind it that makes me glad I can’t see her face. But when she turns back to me, her expression is perfectly normal. “Cass will be all right, dear.”
“And Mick?” I prompt.
“That is under discussion.”
“Under discussion. Was what happened to Esther and Phil discussed ahead of time?”
“Reeve”—she actually has the gall to look upset—“no, it wasn’t. Someone miscalculated badly. They’ve gone back to the primary sources and discovered that what, what Esther and Phil were doing wasn’t so very unusual. And you’re right, the weighting attached to, uh, what they did—Major Fiore misjudged the mood of the crowd. It won’t happen again, we’ve learned from that experience, and from—” She swallows, then nods minutely at the curtain. “If a couple doesn’t get on, there’s going to be a procedure to go through to obtain formal social approval of the separation. We’re not evil. We’re in this for the long haul, and if you’re unhappy, if everyone’s unhappy here, the polity won’t gel, and the experiment can’t work.”
The experiment can’t work. I look at her and find myself wondering, Does she mean it? Fiore and Yourdon are so cynical I find myself startled to be in the presence of a member of their team who seems to believe in what she’s doing. I’m suddenly appalled, as badly taken aback by her honesty as the police zombies are by a stripper. “Uh. I think I see.” I shake my head, then wince. My neck aches. “But as long as Mick stays here, some of us won’t be happy at all.”
“Oh, Mick will be dealt with one way or another, dear.” Her caduceus trills for attention, and she fidgets with it as she talks. “I don’t think the psychological damage is irremediable—we probably won’t have to restore from backup, which is a good thing right now. But I’m going to have to redesign his motivational parameters from the ground up.” She frowns at the serpent heads but doesn’t explain herself further. “Cass will be . . . well, I’m attending to the physical damage right now, and when she’s better, I’ll ask her who she wants to be.” She falls silent for a few seconds. “Most medical fraternities, confronted by a patient with this level of damage, would prescribe gross memory surgery—or simply terminate the instance and restore from backup. I don’t believe in authorizing such a serious step without taking her wishes into account.”
She falls silent again. After a moment I realize she’s staring at me. “What is it?”
“We need to talk about your blackouts.”
“My what?” I bite my tongue, but it’s a bit late to play dumb.
Dr. Hanta raises one eyebrow and crosses her arms. “I’m not stupid, you know.” She looks away, as if she’s speaking to someone else. “Everyone in here has been through redactive reweighting and experiential reduction before we recruit them. One of the reasons this polity needs a medical supervisor is to be ready for identity crises. Most people have some inkling of who they used to be and why they wanted memory surgery. Occasionally, we get someone who doesn’t remember—there’s something they wanted to bury so deep that they wouldn’t even know what it was about. Something painful. But I don’t normally see . . . well! You’ve gone into fugue twice since you were admitted to this ward, did you know that? I checked with your husban
d during your last one, and he said you’ve been having them more frequently.”
She leans toward me, keeping her hands sandwiched in her armpits as if she’s hugging herself. “I don’t like to intrude where I’m not wanted, but by the sound of it, you need help very badly indeed. You seem to have had a bad reaction to the suppressants the clinic used on you, and while I can’t be sure without making a detailed examination, there is a risk that you could be heading for some kind of crisis. I don’t want to overstate things, but in the worst-case scenario you could lose . . . well, everything that makes you you. For example, if it’s an autoimmune reaction—according to your file you’ve got a heuristic upgrade to your complement system, and sometimes the Bayesian recognizers start firing off at the wrong targets—you could end up with anterograde amnesia, a complete inability to lay down any new mnemostructures. Or it might just be a sloppy earlier edit bleeding through and triggering random integration fugues, in which case things will ease off after a while, although you won’t enjoy the ride. But I can’t tell you what to expect, much less treat you, if you won’t even admit you’ve got a problem.”
“Oh.” It takes me a while to absorb this, but Hanta is remarkably patient with me and waits while I think about things. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear she actually liked me. “A problem,” I echo, uncertain how much I can let slip, before a cold chill runs its icy fingers up my spine, and I shudder uncontrollably.
“Speaking of problems . . .” Hanta raises her caduceus: “This will hurt, but only momentarily and a lot less than being eaten alive by a mechaplague.” She smiles faintly as she points it at my shoulder, and I wince as the asps strike at me. There’s a toothy little prickling as they begin pumping adjuvant patches into my circulation, upgrading my prosthetic immune system so that it can deal with the pestis. I try not to wince.
“The infection will take some time to die off, and there’s a risk that it’s adaptable enough to out-evolve the robophages, so I’m going to keep you here overnight—just for observation. Hopefully you’ll be well enough to go home tomorrow, and I’m going to write you up for a week off work while you recover. In the meantime, have a think about what I said concerning your memory problem, and we can talk about it in the morning when I check on your progress.”
The snake-heads let go of me and wrap themselves back around the staff as Hanta stands up. “Sleep well!”
NATURALLY, I don’t sleep well at all.
At first, I spend an indeterminate time shuddering with cold chills and occasionally forgetting to inhale until some primitive reflex kicks me into sucking in great rasping gasps of air. Sleep is out of the question when you’re afraid you’ll stop breathing, so I amuse myself to the point of abject terror by rolling the events of the day over in my mind. Great arterial gouts of blood project like ghosts upon the wall, shadows of my guilt over killing Fiore . . . Fiore? But he doesn’t know I killed him! Did I hallucinate the whole thing? Obviously not the mad scramble up the shaft, arms burning with overstressed muscles. The priest and the doctor both knew about it. Assuming I didn’t imagine their visits, I remind myself. I’m fighting off a mecha infection and an obscure neurological crisis at the same time. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to suspect I might just be out of my skull?
The lights on the ward have dimmed, and the glimpse of sky I can see through the windows is deepening toward purple, fly-specked with burning pinpricks of luminescence that glitter oddly, as if refracted through a deep pool of water. Maybe they don’t know I know about Curious Yellow and the assembler in the library basement, I tell myself. They just think I’m having a mental breakdown, and I went for a little climb. Dissociative fugue, isn’t that what the ancients called it? I got myself infected with compost nano and Fiore called Hanta in to patch me up, and he won’t mention it in Church because it would undermine the integrity of the experiment. Maybe they’re right, and I just imagined killing Fiore. I’m not simply remembering fragments of badly suppressed memories, I’m confabulating out of fragments, synthesizing false memories from the wreckage of a failed erasure job. The memories of my time in the Cats, could they simply be recollections from a game I used to play? Multiplayer immersive worlds with a plot and an identity model—I don’t remember being a gamer, but if I wanted to get rid of an addiction, mightn’t I have tried to flush it out with a lightweight round of memory surgery?
I can’t ask anyone, I realize. If I ask Sam, and he hasn’t heard of the Linebarger Cats, it doesn’t mean they weren’t real—everyone here’s been through memory excision! I’d giggle if my throat wasn’t so dry. I am Reeve! Watch me fake up a bunch of memories to haunt myself with! Was the guy who stalked me through the hallways of the Invisible Republic real? What about the mad bitch with the sword who called me out? I’ve been running from enemies I never actually saw—only glimpsed out of the sides of my eyes. It’s like I’m suffering from blindsight, the strange neurological trauma that leaves its victims unable to see but able to sense events in their visual field by guessing. Maybe I’m an intelligence agent trying to track down a dangerous nest of enemies . . . and maybe I’m just a sad, sick woman who used to substitute game play for living a real life and who’s now paying the price.
I lie awake in the twilight and eventually I realize that the shivering has gone. I ache, and I’m feeble, but that’s to be expected after the long climb. And as I lie there I become aware of the subtle noises on the ward, the soft white noise of the air-conditioning, the tick of a clock, the quiet sobbing of—
Sobbing?
I sit bolt upright, the sheet and blanket falling away from me. My thoughts churn in parallel with a sense of dread and a numinous awareness of relief. Rescuing Cass and If Cass is here, then that memory was real with Still doesn’t mean everything else was real and finally If it was real, Cass must be . . .
“Shit,” I hear myself mutter. I pull the bedding up and clutch it like a frightened child. “I can’t deal with this.” I feel like sucking my thumb. “I am not ready for this.” I’m subvocalizing, so low I make no sound. I have to talk softly when I’m telling myself the truth, because the truth is embarrassing and hurtful. I flash back to what Hanta said: When she’s better, I’ll ask her who she wants to be, and that’s a comfort because I certainly don’t have anything better to offer her. Is Hanta up to doing memory surgery properly? I ponder. It would surprise me if they didn’t have a full surgeon-confessor along for the ride—it’s the ultimate prophylactic for those little ethical embarrassments that an experimental polity might suffer. (Or for those little infiltration-level embarrassments that a secret military installation might encounter, a lying, cynical part of me that I’m no longer entirely sure I believe in adds.)
I lie down again. The sobbing continues for a while, then I hear the clacking heels of a nursing zombie converge on the bed. Quiet voices and a sigh, followed by snores. The white ghost of a nurse pauses at the foot of my bed, its face a dim oval. “Do you need anything?” It asks me.
I shake my head. It’s a lie, but what I need they can’t provide.
Eventually I doze off.
15
Recovery
THE next morning starts badly, shattered into fragments like a dropped vase:
“More fugues. Reeve, you’re getting worse.”
His large hand enfolding my small one. Weak and pale. He strokes the back of my wrist with his thumb. I look into his eyes and see sadness there and wonder why—
Two liquid-metal snake-heads bite at my wrist, and I cry out, pulling away as they inject soothing numbness. The woman who carries them is a goddess, golden-skinned with burning eyes.
I’m a tank again, a regiment of tanks, dropping through the freezing night toward an enemy habitat—or did this come later? I disconnect from the virtch interface and shake my head, look around at the other players in the game arcade, and hear myself whisper, “But it wasn’t like that—”
Scratch of a carved goose feather on rough paper, body of a pen made from a human bone. You
will remember nothing at first. If you did, they could parse your experience vector and identify you as a threat.
“She’s really bad this morning. The adjuvants have worked—that infection is definitely on the mend—but she’s no use to us like this.”
“What do you expect me to do? She’s in danger of sliding into full-blown anterograde—”
A suffocating stench of bowels as I slide my rapier back out of his guts. He lies among the rosebushes in a dueling zone, beneath the shadow of a marble statue of an extinct species of flying mammal. A sudden stab of horror, because this is a man I could have loved.
“Fix her.”
“I can’t! Not without her consent.”
Hand tightening around someone’s wrist until it’s almost painful. “She’s in no condition to give it—look at that, what are you going to do if she starts to convulse?”
I’m a tank again, looping in a pool of horrors, blood trickling beneath my gridded toes as I swing my sword through the neck of another screaming woman while two of my other instances hold her down.
I’m flying, tumbling arse over wing as my thumb sings a keening pain of broken bone, and I smell the fresh water of the roaring waterfall beneath me.
“Make it stop,” I hear someone mumble, and there’s blood on my lips where I’ve almost bitten through them. It’s me who’s being held down by the tanks, facing a woman with burning eyes, and behind her is a man who loves me, if I could only remember what his name was.
The snakes bite again and drink deep, and the sun goes dark.
RESTART:
I become aware that someone is holding my right hand.
Then, a timeless period later, I realize that he’s still holding my hand. Which implies he’s very patient, because I’m still lying in bed, and it’s very bright. “What time is it?” I ask, mildly panicky because I need to get to work.
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