Glasshouse Part 1

Gla.s.shouse.

by Charles Stross.

Acknowledgments.

Thanks due to: James Nicoll, Robert aNojaya Sneddon, Cory Doctorow, Andrew J. Wilson, Caitlin Blasdell, David Clements, Sean Eric f.a.gan, Farah Mendlesohn, Ken MacLeod, Juliet McKenna, and all the usual suspects.

aThis apparatus,a said the Officer, grasping a connecting rod and leaning against it, ais our previous Commandantas invention. . . . Have you heard of our previous Commandant? No? Well, Iam not claiming too much when I say that the organization of the entire penal colony is his work. We, his friends, already knew at the time of his death that the administration of the colony was so self-contained that even if his successor had a thousand new plans in mind he would not be able to alter anything of the old plan, at least not for several years . . . Itas a shame that you didnat know the old Commandant!a a"aIn the Penal Colony,a Frank Kafka Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians?

a"Adolf Hitler, 1939.

Note.

The polities descended from the Republic of Is do not use days, weeks, or other terrestrial dating systems other than for historical or archaeological purposes; however, the cla.s.sical second has been retained as the basis of timekeeping.

Hereas a quick ready-reckoner: one second One second, the time taken for light to travel 299,792,458 meters in vacuum one kilosecond Archaic: 16 minutes one hundred kiloseconds (1 diurn) Archaic: 27 hours, 1 day and three hours one megasecond (1 cycle) Ten diurns. Archaic: eleven days and six hours thirty megaseconds (1 m-year) 300 diurns. Archaic: 337 Earth days (11 months) one gigasecond Archaic: approximately 31 Earth years one terasecond Archaic: approximately 31,000 Earth years (half age of human species) one petasecond Archaic: approximately 31,000,000 Earth years (half elapsed time since end of Cretaceous era).

1.

Duel.

A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls. Her hair forms a smoky wreath around her open and curious face. Sheas interested in me.

aYouare new around here, arenat you?a she asks, pausing in front of my table.

I stare at her. Apart from the neatly articulated extra shoulder joints, the body sheas wearing is roughly ortho, following the traditional human body plan. The skulls are subsized, strung together on a necklace threaded with barbed wire and roses. aYes, Iam a nube,a I say. My parole ring makes my left index finger tingle, a little reminder. aIam required to warn you that Iam undergoing ident.i.ty reindexing and rehabilitation. Ia"people in my statea"may be p.r.o.ne to violent outbursts. Donat worry, thatas just a statutory warning: I wonat hurt you. What makes you ask?a She shrugs. Itas an elaborate rippling gesture that ends with a wiggle of her hips. aBecause I havenat seen you here before, and Iave been coming here most nights for the past twenty or thirty diurns. You can earn extra rehab credit by helping out. Donat worry about the parole ring, most of us here have them. I had to warn people myself a while ago.a I manage to force a smile. A fellow inmate? Further along the program? aWould you like a drink?a I ask, gesturing at the chair next to me. aAnd what are you called, if you donat mind me asking?a aIam Kay.a She pulls out the chair and sits, flipping her great ma.s.s of dark hair over her shoulder and tucking her skulls under the table with two hands as she glances at the menu. aHmm, I think I will have an iced double mocha pickup, easy on the coca.a She looks at me again, staring at my eyes. aThe clinic arranges things so that thereas always a volunteer around to greet nubes. Itas my turn this swing shift. Do you want to tell me your name? Or where youare from?a aIf you like.a My ring tingles, and I remember to smile. aMy nameas Robin, and youare right, Iam fresh out of the rehab tank. Only been out for a meg, to tell the truth.a (A bit over ten planetary days, a million seconds.) aIam fromaa"I go into quicktime for a few subseconds, trying to work out what story to give her, ending up with an approximation of the trutha"aaround these parts, actually. But just out of memory excision. I was getting stale and needed to do something about whatever it was I was getting stale over.a Kay smiles. Sheas got sharp cheekbones, bright teeth framed between perfect lips; sheas got bilateral symmetry, three billion years of evolutionary heuristics and homeobox genes generating a face thatas a mirror of itselfa"and where did that thought come from? I ask myself, annoyed. Itas tough, not being able to tell the difference between your own thoughts and a postsurgical ident.i.ty prosthesis.

aI havenat been human for long,a she admits. aI just moved here from Zemlya.a Pause. aFor my surgery,a she adds quietly.

I fiddle with the ta.s.sels dangling from my sword pommel. Thereas something not quite right about them, and itas bugging me intensely. aYou lived with the ice ghouls?a I ask.

aNot quitea"I was an ice ghoul.a That gets my attention: I donat think Iave ever met a real live alien before, even an ex-alien. aWere youaa"whatas the word?a"aborn that way, or did you emigrate for a while?a aTwo questions.a She holds up a finger. aTrade?a aTrade.a I remember to nod without prompting, and my ring sends me a flicker of warmth. Itas crude conditioning: reward behavior indicative of recovery, punish behavior that reinforces the postsurgical fugue. I donat like it, but they tell me itas an essential part of the process.

aI emigrated to Zemlya right after my previous memory dump.a Something about her expression strikes me as evasive. What could she be omitting? A failed business venture, personal enemies? aI wanted to study ghoul society from the inside.a Her c.o.c.ktail emerges from the table, and she takes an experimental sip. aTheyare so strange.a She looks wistful for a moment. aBut after a generation I got . . . sad.a Another sip. aI was living among them to study them, you see. And when you live among people for gigaseconds on end you canat stop yourself getting involved, not unless you go totally post and upgrade youra"well. I made friends and watched them grow old and die until I couldnat take any more. I had to come back and excise the . . . the impact. The pain.a Gigaseconds? Thirty planetary years each. Thatas a long time to spend among aliens. Sheas studying me intently. aThat must have been very precise surgery,a I say slowly. aI donat remember much of my previous life.a aYou were human, though,a she prods.

aYes.a Emphatically yes. Shards of memory remain: a flash of swords in a twilit alleyway in the remilitarized zone. Blood in the fountains. aI was an academic. A member of the professoriat.a An array of firewalled a.s.sembler gates, lined up behind the fearsome armor of a customs checkpoint between polities. Pushing screaming, imploring civilians toward a shadowy entrancea"aI taught history.a That much isa"wasa"true. aIt all seems boring and distant now.a The brief flash of an energy weapon, then silence. aI was getting stuck in a rut, and I needed to refresh myself. I think.a Which is almost but not quite a complete lie. I didnat volunteer, someone made me an offer I couldnat refuse. I knew too much. Either consent to undergo memory surgery, or my next death would be my last. At least, thatas what it said Iad done in the dead-paper letter that was waiting by my bedside when I awakened in the rehab center, fresh from having the water of Lethe delivered straight to my brain by the molecular-sized robots of the hospitaler surgeon-confessors. I grin, sealing the partial truths with an outright lie. aSo I had a radical rebuild, and now I canat remember why.a aAnd you feel like a new human,a she says, smiling faintly.

aYes.a I glance at her lower pair of hands. I canat help noticing that sheas fidgeting. aEven though I stuck with this conservative body plan.a Iam very conservatively turned outa"a medium-height male, dark eyes, wiry, the stubble of dark hair beginning to appear across my scalpa"like an unreconstructed Eurasian from the pre-s.p.a.ce era, right down to the leather kilt and hemp sandals. aI have a strong self-image, and I didnat really want to shed ita"too many a.s.sociations tied up in there. Those are nice skulls, by the way.a Kay smiles. aThank you. And thank you again for not asking, by the way.a aAsking?a aThe usual question: Why do you look like, well . . .a I pick up my gla.s.s for the first time and take a sip of the bitingly cold blue liquid. aYouave just spent an entire prehistoric human lifetime as an ice ghoul and people are needling you for having too many arms?a I shake my head. aI just a.s.sumed you have a good reason.a She crosses both pairs of arms defensively. aIad feel like a liar looking like . . .a She glances past me. There are a handful of other people in the bar, a few bushujo and a couple of cyborgs, but most of them are wearing orthohuman bodies. Sheas glancing at a woman with long blond hair on one side of her head and stubble on the other, wearing a filmy white drape and a sword belt. The woman is braying loudly with laughter at something one of her companions just saida"berserkers on the prowl for players. aHer, for example.a aBut you were orthohuman once?a aI still am, inside.a The penny drops: She wears xenohuman drag when sheas in public because sheas shy. I glance over at the group and accidentally make eye contact with the blond woman. She looks at me, stiffens, then pointedly turns away. aHow long has this bar been here?a I ask, my ears burning. How dare she do that to me?

aAbout three megs.a Kay nods at the group of orthos across the room. aI really would avoid paying obvious attention to them, theyare duelists.a aSo am I.a I nod at her. aI find it therapeutic.a She grimaces. aI donat play, myself. Itas messy. And I donat like pain.a aWell, neither do I,a I say slowly. aThatas not the point.a The point is that we get angry when we canat remember who we are, and we lash out at first; and a structured, formal framework means that n.o.body else needs to get hurt.

aWhere do you live?a she asks.

aIam in theaa"sheas transparently changing the subject, I realizea"aclinic, still. I mean, everything I had, Iaa"liquidated and rana"aI travel light. I still havenat decided what to be in this new lifetime, so there doesnat seem much point in having lots of baggage.a aAnother drink?a Kay asks. aIam buying.a aYes, please.a A warning bell rings in my head as I sense Blondie heading toward our table. I pretend not to notice, but I can feel a familiar warmth in my stomach, a tension in my back. Ancient reflexes and not a few modern cheat-codes take over and I surrept.i.tiously loosen my sword in its scabbard. I think I know what Blondie wants, and Iam perfectly happy to give it to her. Sheas not the only one around here p.r.o.ne to frequent flashes of murderous rage that take a while to cool. The counselor told me to embrace it and give in, among consenting fellows. It should burn itself out in time. Which is why Iam carrying.

But the postexcision rages arenat my only irritant. In addition to memory edits, I opted to have my age reset. Being postadolescent again brings its own dynamic of hormonal torment. It makes me pace my apartment restlessly, drives me to stand in the white cube of the hygiene suite and draw blades down the insides of my arms, curious to see the bright rosy blood welling up. s.e.x has acquired an obsessive importance Iad almost forgotten. The urges to s.e.x and violence are curiously hard to fight off when you awaken drained and empty and unable to remember who you used to be, but theyare a lot less fun, the second or third time through the cycle of rejuvenation.

aListen, donat look round, but you probably ought to know that someone is about toa"a Before I can finish the sentence, Blondie leans over Kayas shoulder and spits in my face. aI demand satisfaction.a She has a voice like a diamond drill.

aWhy?a I ask stonily, heart thumping with tension as I wipe my cheek. I can feel the rage building, but I force myself to keep it under control.

aYou exist.a Thereas a certain type of look some postrehab cases get while theyare in the psychopathic dissociative stage, still reknitting the raveled threads of their personality and memories into a new ident.i.ty. The insensate anger at the world, the existential hatea"often directed at their previously whole self for putting them into this world, naked and stripped of memoriesa"generates its own dynamic. Wild black-eyed hatred and the perfect musculature of the optimized phenotype combine to lend Blondie an intimidating, almost primal presence. Nevertheless, sheas got enough self-control to issue a challenge before she attacks.

Kay, shy and much further advanced in recovery than either of us, cowers in her seat as Blondie glares at me. That annoys mea"Blondieas got no call to intimidate bystanders. And maybe Iam not as out of control as I feel.

aIn that caseaa"I slowly stand up, not breaking eye contact for a momenta"ahow about we take this to the remilitarized zone? First death rules?a aYes,a she hisses.

I glance at Kay. aNice talking to you. Order me another drink? Iall be right back.a I can feel her eyes on my back as I follow Blondie to the gate to the RMZ. Which is right beside the bar.

Blondie pauses on the threshold. aAfter you,a she says.

aAu contraire. Challenger goes first.a She glares at me one more time, clearly furious, then strides into the T-gate and blinks out. I wipe my right palm on my leather kilt, grip the hilt of my sword, draw, and leap through the point-to-point wormhole.

Dueling etiquette calls for the challenger to clear the gate by a good ten paces, but Blondie isnat in a good mood, and itas a very good thing that Iam on the defensive and ready to parry as I go through because sheas waiting, ready to shove her sword through my abdomen on the spot.

Sheas fast and vicious and utterly uninterested in playing by the rules, which is fine by me because my own existential rage now has an outlet and a face. The anger that has been eating me up since my surgery, the hatred of the war criminals who forced me into this, of the person I used to be who surrendered to the large-scale erasure of their memoriesa"I canat even remember what s.e.x I was, or how talla"has a focus, and on the other end of her circling blade, Blondieas face is a glow of concentration and fury to mirror my own.

This part of the remilitarized zone is modeled on a ruined city of old Urth, shattered postnuclear concrete wastelands and strange creeping vegetation shrouding the statues of conquerors and the burned-out wreckage of wheeled cars. We could be alone here, marooned on a planet uninhabited by other sapients. Alone to work out our grief and rage as the postsurgical fugue slowly dissipates.

Blondie tries to rush me, and I fall back carefully, trying to spot some weakness in her attack. She prefers the edge to the point and the right to the left, but sheas not leaving me any openings. aHurry up and die!a she snaps.

aAfter you.a I feint and try to draw her off-balance, circling round her. Next to the gate we came in through thereas a ruined stump of a tall building, rubble heaped up above head height. (The gateas beacon flashes red, signifying no egress until one of us is dead.) The rubble gives me an idea, and I feint again, then back off and leave an opening for her.

Blondie takes the opening, and I just barely block her, because sheas fast. But sheas not sly, and she certainly wasnat expecting the knife in my left handa"taped to my left thigh beforea"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 shouldnat trust my instincts quite so totally.

aDone?a I ask, suddenly feeling faint.

aIa"a Thereas a curious expression on her face as she holds on to the basket of my sword. aUh.a She tries to swallow. aWho?a aIam Robin,a I say lightly, watching her with interest. Iam not sure Iave ever watched somebody dying with a sword through their guts before. Thereas lots of blood and a really vile smell of ruptured intestines. Iad have thought shead be writhing and screaming, but maybe sheas got an autonomic override. Anyway, Iam busy holding my leg together. Blood keeps welling up between my fingers. Comradeship in pain. aYou are . . . ?a aGwyn.a She swallows. The light of hatred is extinguished, leaving somethinga"puzzlement?a"behind.

aWhen did you last back up, Gwyn?a She squints. aUnh. Hour. Ago.a aWell then. Would you like me to end this?a It takes a moment for her to meet my eyes. She nods. aWhen? You?a I lean over, grimacing, and pick up her blade. aWhen did I last back myself up? Since recovering from memory surgery, you mean?a She nods, or maybe shudders. I raise the blade and frown, lining it up on her neck: it takes all my energy. aGood questiona"a I slice through her throat. Blood sprays everywhere.

aNever.a I stumble to the exita"an A-gatea"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 Iall be ready for a backup soon? I flex my right leg. The a.s.sembleras done a good job of canonicalizing it, and the edited muscle works just fine. I resolve to avoid Gwyn, at least until sheas 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. Iad 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: thatas a lot of bits and atoms to juggle.) I drop into my seat. She has bought me another drink. aIam sorry about that,a I say automatically.

aYou get used to it around here.a She sounds philosophical. aFeeling better?a aYou know, Ia"a I stop. Just for a moment Iam back in that dusty concrete-strewn wasteland, a searing pain in my leg, the sheer hatred I feel fueling my throw at Gwynas head. aItas gone,a I say. I stare at the gla.s.s, then pick it up and knock back half of it in one go.

aWhatas gone?a I catch her watching me. aIf you donat mind talking about it,a she adds hastily.

Sheas frightened but concerned, I suddenly realize. My parole ring pulses warmth repeatedly. aI donat mind,a I say, and smile, probably a trifle tiredly. I put the gla.s.s down. aIam 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 Iam not.a aThatas very common.a Her tone is guarded. aWhat changed it for you?a I frown. Knowing itas a common side effect of reintegration doesnat help. aIave been an idiot. I need to take a backup as soon as I go home.a aA backup?a Her eyes widen. aYouave been walking around here wearing a sword and a dueling sash all evening, and you donat have a backup?a Her voice rises to a squeak. aWhat are you trying to do?a aKnowing youave got a backup blunts your edge. Anyway, I was angry with myself.a I stop frowning as I look at her. aBut you canat stay angry forever.a More to the point, Iam 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 peopleas 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 isnat something most people take lightly. For a horrible moment I feel the urge to rush out and find Gwyn and apologize to hera"but thatas absurd, she wonat remember, sheall be in the same heads.p.a.ce she was in before. Shead probably challenge me to another duel and, being in the same insensate rage, turn me into hamburger on the spot.

aI think Iam reconnecting,a I say slowly. aDo you know somewhere I could go thatas safer? I mean, less likely to attract the attentions of berserkers?a aHmm.a She looks at me critically. aIf you lose the sword and the sash, you wonat look out of place round the block in one of the phase two recovery piazzas. I know a place that does a really good joesteaka"how hungry are you feeling?a IN the wake of the duel I have become hungry for food just as my appet.i.te 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 sheas 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 thereas 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, pa.s.sing 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 t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es with three of her hands. Then she vanishes into the hygiene suite to use the a.s.sembler, leaving me panting. When she returns I almost donat recognize hera"her hair has turned blue, sheas 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 f.u.c.k, we join the circle with the pipea"which is loaded with opium and an easily vaporized phosphodiesterase inhibitora"then explore each otheras bodies and those of our neighbors until weare close to falling asleep.

Iam lying next to her, almost face-to-face, when she murmurs, aThat was fun.a aFun,a I echo. aI neededa"a My vision blurs. aToo long.a aI come here regularly,a she offers. aYou?a aI havenata"a I pause.

aWhat?a aI canat remember when I last had s.e.x.a She places one hand between my thighs. aReally?a She looks puzzled.

aI canat.a I frown. aI must have forgotten it.a aForgotten? Truly?a She looks surprised. aCould you have had a bad relationship or something? Could that be why you had surgery?a aNo, Ia"a I stop before anything more slips out. The letter from my older self would have said if that was the case, Iam certain of that much. aItas just gone. I donat think that usually happens, does it?a aNo.a 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 couldnat possibly stay aroused this long without some external input, could I? aYouad be a good subject for Yourdonas experiment.a aYourdonas what?a 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 b.u.t.tocks and pull her down onto me.

aThe experiment. Heas looking for serious amnesia cases, offering a referral fee to finders. Iall tell you later.a And then we stop talking, because speech is simply getting in the way of communication, and in the here and now, sheas all I need.

AFTERWARD, I walk home through avenues carpeted with soft, living gra.s.s, 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 donat 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 alivea"whoever I am. Iam Robin, arenat 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 Iam 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 s.e.x before, but I donat remember it. Clearly I have dueleda"my reflexes and unconscious skills made short work of Gwyna"but I donat 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 donat remember any of it at all. Maybe itas buried deep, to re-emerge when I need ita"and maybe itas gone for good. Whatever grade of memory excision my earlier self requested must have been perilously close to a total wipe.

So whatas 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. Iam 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 strangera"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, pa.s.ses over T-gates, point-to-point wormholes linking distant locations. T-gates have two endpoints, and are unfiltereda"anything can pa.s.s through one, from one end to the other. While this isnat a problem within a polity, itas a huge problem when youare 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-gatea"an a.s.sembler array that disa.s.sembled, uploaded, and a.n.a.lyzed them for threats, before routing them as serial data to another A-gate on the inside of the DMZ for rea.s.sembly. 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 canat remember what it was about, but I was definitely guarding cross-bordera"longjumpa"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 wasnat 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ident.i.ty. I canat 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 s.p.a.ce delineated by another T-gate. Stepping through the wormhole, I feel light-footed: gravity here declines to hold me, and there is a p.r.o.nounced 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, Iad 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 pa.s.s several moving human-sized cloudsa"privacy haze fuzzing out the other travelers so that we do not have to notice each othera"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. Itas 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 a.s.signed 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.

TODAYaS therapist isnat remotely humanoid, not even bushujo or elven; Piccolo-47 is a mesomorphic drone, roughly pear-shaped, with a variety of bizarre-looking extensible robot limbsa"some of them not physically connected to Piccoloas bodya"and nothing that resembles a face. Personally, I think thatas 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. Itas probably doing it on purpose to see how stable I ama"if I canat cope with someone who doesnat 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. Iam tired, and Iad like to have a long bath and go to sleep, so I resolve to get this over without any unpleasant incidents.

aYou fought a duel today,a says Piccolo-47. aPlease describe the events leading up to the incident in your own words.a 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 Iam talking to a household appliance. That helps. aSure,a I say, and summarize the diurnas eventsa"at least, the public ones.

aDo you feel that Gwyn provoked you unduly?a asks the counselor.

aHmm.a I think about it for a moment. aI think I may have provoked her,a I say slowly. aNot intentionally, but she caught me watching her, and I could probably have disengaged. If Iad wanted to.a The admission makes me feel slightly dirtya"but only slightly. Gwyn is walking around right now with no memory of having been stabbed in the guts. Sheas lost less than an hour of her lifeline. Whereas my leg is still giving me twinges of memory, and I riskeda"

aYou said you have not taken a backup. Isnat that a little foolhardy?a aYes, yes it is.a I make up my mind. aAnd Iam going to take one as soon as we finish this conversation.a aGood.a I startle slightly and stare at Piccolo-47, disturbed. Therapists donat normally express opinions, positive or negative, during a session; itas just broken the illusion that itas not there, and I feel my skin crawl slightly as I look at its smooth carapace. aExamination 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.a aUm.a I stare. aI thought you werenat meant to intervene . . . ?a aIntervention 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.a Then Piccolo-47 pauses. aI would like to make a request. You are free to disregard it.a aOh?a I stare at its dorsal manipulator root. Itas something like an iridescent cauliflower, flexing and shimmering and breathing, and something like a naked lung, turned inside out and electroplated with t.i.tanium. Itas fascinatingly abhuman, a macroscopic nanomachine so complex it seems almost alive in its own right.

aYou 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 partic.i.p.ant for the project. I also believe that your long-term recovery may benefit from partic.i.p.ation.a aHmm.a I can tell when Iam being stroked for a hard sell. aYouall have to tell me more about it.a aCertainly. One moment?a I can tell Piccolo-47 is going into quicktime and messaging someone else: its focus of attention wandersa"I can see the sensor peripherals unfocusinga"and the manipulator root stops shimmering. aI have taken the liberty of transmitting your public case profile to the coordination office, Robin. The experiment I allude to is a cross-disciplinary one being conducted by the departments of archaeology, history, psychology, and social engineering within the Scholastium. Professor Yourdon is its coordinator-general. If you volunteer to partic.i.p.ate, a copy of your next backupa"or your original, should you choose total immersiona"will be instantiated as a separate ent.i.ty within an experimental community, where it will live alongside roughly a hundred other volunteers for thirty to a hundred megaseconds.a Roughly one to three old-style years. aThe community is designed as an experiment to probe certain psychological constraints a.s.sociated with life prior to the censorship wars. An attempt to reconstruct a culture that we have lost track of, in other words.a aAn experimental society?a aYes. We have limited data about many periods in our history. Dark ages have become all too frequent since the dawn of the age of emotional machines. Sometimes they are unintentionala"the worst dark age, at the dawn of the emotional age, was caused by the failure to understand informational economics and the consequent adoption of incompatible data representation formats. Sometimes theyare deliberatea"the censorship wars, for example. But the c.u.mulative result is that there are large periods of history from which very little information survives that has not been skewed by observational bias. Propaganda, entertainment, and self-image conspire to rob us of accurate depictions, and old age and the need for periodic memory excision rob us of our subjective experiences. So Professor Yourdonas experiment is intended to probe emergent social relationships in an early emotional-age culture that is largely lost to us today.a aI think I see.a I shuffle against the stonework and lean back against the fountain. Piccolo-47as voice oozes with rea.s.surance. Iam pretty sure itas emitting a haze of feel-good pheromones, but if my suspicions are correct it wonat have thought of the simple somatic discomforts I can inflict on myself to help me stay alert. The pitter-patter of icy droplets on my neck is a steady irritant. aSo Iad, what, go live in this community for ten megs? And then what? What would I do?a aI canat tell you in any great detail,a Piccolo-47 admits, its tones conciliatory and calm. aThat would undermine the integrity of the experiment. Its goals and functions have to remain uncertain to the subjects if it is to retain any empirical validity, because it is meant to be a living societya"a real one. What I can tell you is that you will be free to leave as soon as the experiment reaches an end state that satisfies the acceptance criteria of the gatekeeper, or if the ethics committee supervising it approves an early release. Within it, there will be certain restrictions on your freedom of movement, freedom of access to information and medical procedures, and restrictions on the artifacts and services available to you that postdate the period being probed. From time to time the gatekeeper will broadcast certain information to the partic.i.p.ants, to guide your understanding of the society. There is a release to be notarized before you can join. But we a.s.sure you that all your rights and dignities will be preserved intact.a aWhatas in it for me?a I ask bluntly.

aYou will be paid handsomely for your partic.i.p.ation.a Piccolo-47 sounds almost bashful. aAnd there is an extra bonus scheme for subjects who contribute actively to the success of the project.a aUh-huh.a I grin at my therapist. aThatas not what I meant.a If he thinks I need credit, heas sadly mistaken. I donat know who I was working for beforea"whether it really was the Linebarger Cats or some other, more obscure (and even more terrifying) Powera"but one thing is certain, they didnat leave me dest.i.tute when they ordered me to undergo memory excision.

aThere is also the therapeutic aspect,a says Piccolo-47. aYou appear to harbor goal-dysphoria issues. These relate to the almost complete erasure of your delta block reward/motivation centers, along with the a.s.sociated memories of your former vocation; bluntly, you feel directionless and idle. Within the simulation community, you will be provided with an occupation and expected to work, and introduced to a community of peers who are all in the same situation as you. Comradeship and a renewed sense of purpose are likely side effects of this experiment. Meanwhile you will have time to cultivate your personal interests and select a direction that fits your new ident.i.ty, without pressure from former a.s.sociates or acquaintances. And I repeat, you will be paid handsomely for your partic.i.p.ation.a Piccolo-47 pauses for a moment. aYou have already met one of your fellow partic.i.p.ants,a he adds.

A hit.

aIall think about it,a I say noncommittally. aSend me the details and Iall think about it. But Iam not going to say yes or no on the spot.a I grin wider, baring my teeth. aI donat like being pressured.a aI understand.a Piccolo-47 rises slightly and moves backward a meter or so. aPlease excuse me. I am very enthusiastic for the experiment to proceed successfully.a aSure.a I wave it off. aNow if youall excuse me, I really do need some privacy. I still sleep, you know.a aI will see you in approximately one diurn,a says Piccolo-47, rising farther and rotating toward a hole that is irising open in the ceiling. aGoodbye.a Then itas gone, leaving only a faint smell of lavender behind, and me to the strikingly vivid memory of the taste and feel of Kayas tongue exploring my lips.

2.

Experiment.

WELCOME to the Invisible Republic.

The Invisible Republic is one of the legacy polities that emerged from the splinters of the Republic of Is, in the wake of the series of censorship wars that raged five to ten gigaseconds ago. During the wars, the internetwork of longjump T-gates that wove the subnets of the hyperpower together was shattered, leaving behind spa.r.s.ely connected nets, their borders filtered through firewalled a.s.sembler gates guarded by ferocious mercenaries. Incomers were subjected to forced disa.s.sembly and scanned for subversive attributes before being rebuilt and allowed across the frontiers. Battles raged across the airless cryogenic wastes that housed the longjump nodes carrying traffic between warring polities, while the redactive worms released by the Censor factions lurked in the firmware of every A-gate they could contaminate, their viral payload mercilessly deleting all knowledge of the underlying cause of the conflict from fleeing refugees as they pa.s.sed through the gates.

Like almost all human polities since the Acceleration, the Republic of Is relied heavily on A-gates for manufacturing, routing, switching, filtering, and the other essentials of any network civilization. The ability of nanoa.s.sembler arrays to deconstruct and replicate artifacts and organisms from raw atomic feedstock made them virtually indispensablea"not merely for manufacturing and medical purposes, but for virtual transport (itas easier to simultaneously cram a hundred upload templates through a T-gate than a hundred physical bodies) and molecular firewalling. Even when war exposed them to subversion by the worms of censorship, n.o.body wanted to do without the A-gatesa"to grow old and decrepit, or succ.u.mb to injury, seemed worse than the risk of memory corruption. The paranoid few who refused to pa.s.s through the verminous gates dropped away, dying of old age or c.u.mulative accidental damage; meanwhile, those of us who still used them can no longer be certain of whatever it was that the worm payloads were designed to hide in the first place. Or even who the Censors were.

But the stress of the censorship caused people to distrust all gates that they didnat control themselves. You canat censor data or ma.s.s flowing through a T-gate, which is simply a wormhole of twisted s.p.a.ce-time connecting two distant points. So even short-range traffic switched to T-gates, while new ma.s.s a.s.semblies became scarce because of generalized distrust of the Censored A-gates. There was an economic crash, then a splintering of communications, and entire T-gate networksa"networks with high degrees of internal connectivity, not necessarily spatial proximitya"began to disconnect from the wider net. Is became Was, and what was once a myriad of public malls with open topologies sprouted fearsome armed checkpoints, frontier posts between firewalled virtual republics.

That was then, and this is now. The Invisible Republic was one of the first successor states to form. They built an intranetwork of T-gates and fiercely defended them from the outside until the first generation of fresh A-gates, bootstrapped painfully all the way from hand-lithographed quantum dot arrays, became available. The Invisibles started out as a group of academic inst.i.tutions that set up a distributed trust system early in the censorship; they still retain their military-academic roots. The Scholastium views knowledge as power and seeks to restore the data lost during successive dark agesa"although whether it is really a good idea to uncover the cause of the censorship is a matter of hot debate. Just about everyone lost parts of their lives during the war, and tens of billions more died completely: Re-creating the preconditions for the worst holocaust since the twenty-third century is not uncontroversial.

Ironically, the Invisible Republic is now the place where many people come in order to forget their pasts. We who remain human (while relying on A-gate redaction to save our bodies from senescence) sooner or later need to learn to forget. Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life. But forgetting is a fraught process, one that is p.r.o.ne to transcription errors and personality flaws. Delete the wrong pattern, and you can end up becoming someone else. Memories exhibit dependencies, and their management is one of the highest medical art forms. Hence the high status and vast resources of the surgeon-confessors, into whose hands my earlier self delivered me. The surgeon-confessors learned their skills by forensic a.n.a.lysis of the damage done to the victims of the censorship wars. And thus, yesterdayas high crime leads to todayas medical treatment.

A few diurnsa"almost half a tendaya"after my little chat with Piccolo- 47, I am back in the recovery club, nursing a drink and enjoying the mild hallucinations it brings on in conjunction with the mood music the venue plays for me. Itas been voted a hot day, and most of the party animals are out in the courtyard, where theyave grown a swimming pool. Iave been studying, trying to absorb what I can of the const.i.tution and jurisprudential traditions of the Invisible Republic, but itas hard work, so I decided to come here to unwind. Iave left my sword and dueleras sash back home. Instead, Iam wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets st.i.tched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibilitya"woven in free fall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, Iam told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist. I feel pretty good about myself because my most recent therapist-a.s.signee, Lute-629, says Iam making good progress. Which is probably why Iam not sufficiently on guard.

Iam sitting alone at a table minding my own business when, without any kind of warning, two hands clap themselves over my eyes. I startle and try to stand up, tensing in the first instinctive move to throw up a blocking forearm, but another pair of hands is already pressing down on my shoulders. I realize who it is only just in time to avoid punching her in the face. ah.e.l.lo, stranger,a she breathes in my ear, apparently unaware of how close I came to striking her.

aHey.a In one dizzy moment I smell her skin against the side of my cheek as my heart tries to lurch out of my chest, and I break out in a cold sweat. I reach up carefully to stroke the side of her face. Iam about to suggest she shouldnat sneak up on me, but I can visualize her smiling, and something makes me take a more friendly tone. aI was wondering if Iad see you here.a aHappens.a The hands vanish from my eyes as she lets go of me. I twist round to see her impish grin. aIam not disturbing anything important, am I?a aOh, hardly. Iave just had my fill of studying, and itas time to relax.a I grin ruefully. And I would be relaxing if you werenat giving me fight-or-flight attacks!

aGood.a She slides into the booth beside me, leans up against my side, and snaps her fingers at the menu. Moments later a long, tall something or other that varies from gold at the top to blue at the bottom arrives in a gla.s.s of flash-frozen ice that steams slightly in the humid air. I can see horse-head ripples in the mist, blue steam-trails of self-similarity. aIam never sure whether itas polite to ask people if they want to socializea"the conventions are too different from what Iam used to.a aOh, Iam easy.a I finish my own drink and let the table reabsorb my gla.s.s. aActually, I was thinking about a meal. Are you by any chance hungry?a aI could be.a She chews her lower lip and looks at me pensively. aYou said you were hoping to see me.a aYes. I was wondering about the, uh, greeter thing. Who runs it, and whether they need any volunteers.a She blinks and looks me up and down. aYou think youare sufficiently in control? You want to volunteer toa"remarkable!a One of my external triggers twitches, telling me that sheas accessing my public metadata, the numinous cloud of medical notes that follow us all around like a swarm of phantom bees, ready to sting us into submission at the first sign of undirected aggression. aYouave made really good progress!a aI donat want to be a patient forever.a I probably sound a bit defensive. Maybe she doesnat realize sheas rubbed me up the wrong way, but I really donat like being patronized.

aDo you know what youare going to do when your control metrics are within citizenship bounds?a she asks.

aNo idea.a I glance at the menu. aHey, Iall have one of whatever sheas drinking,a I tell the table.

aWhy not?a She sounds innocently curious. Maybe thatas why I decide to tell her the unembellished truth.