Charles Stross - Glasshouse

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Glasshouse

GLASSHOUSE

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Glasshouse

Charles Stross

Ace titles by Charles Stross

SINGULARITY SKY

IRON SUNRISE

ACCELERANDO

THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES

GLASSHOUSE

For Ken MacLeod

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. She's

interested in me.

"You're new around here, aren't you?" she asks, pausing in front of my table.

I stare at her. Apart from the neatly articulated extra shoulder joints, the body she's 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. "Yes, I'm a nube," I say. My parole ring makes my left index finger

tingle, a little reminder. "I'm required to warn you that I'm undergoing identity reindexing and

rehabilitation. I—people in my state—may be prone to violent outbursts. Don't worry, that's just a

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statutory warning: I won't hurt you. What makes you ask?"

She shrugs. It's an elaborate rippling gesture that ends with a wiggle of her hips. "Because I haven't seen

you here before, and I've been coming here most nights for the past twenty or thirty diurns. You can earn

extra rehab credit by helping out. Don't worry about the parole ring, most of us here have them. I had to

warn people myself a while ago."

I manage to force a smile. A fellow inmate? Further along the program? "Would you like a drink?" I ask,

gesturing at the chair next to me. "And what are you called, if you don't mind me asking?"

"I'm Kay." She pulls out the chair and sits, flipping her great mass of dark hair over her shoulder and

tucking her skulls under the table with two hands as she glances at the menu. "Hmm, I think I will have

an iced double mocha pickup, easy on the coca." She looks at me again, staring at my eyes. "The clinic

arranges things so that there's always a volunteer around to greet nubes. It's my turn this swing shift. Do

you want to tell me your name? Or where you're from?"

"If you like." My ring tingles, and I remember to smile. "My name's Robin, and you're right, I'm fresh

out of the rehab tank. Only been out for a meg, to tell the truth." (A bit over ten planetary days, a million

seconds.) "I'm from"—I go into quicktime for a few subseconds, trying to work out what story to give

her, ending up with an approximation of the truth—"around 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."

Kay smiles. She's got sharp cheekbones, bright teeth framed between perfect lips; she's got bilateral

symmetry, three billion years of evolutionary heuristics and homeobox genes generating a face that's a

mirror of itself—and where did that thought come from? I ask myself, annoyed. It's tough, not being

able to tell the difference between your own thoughts and a postsurgical identity prosthesis.

"I haven't been human for long," she admits. "I just moved here from Zemlya." Pause. "For my surgery,"

she adds quietly.

I fiddle with the tassels dangling from my sword pommel. There's something not quite right about them,

and it's bugging me intensely. "You lived with the ice ghouls?" I ask.

"Not quite—I was an ice ghoul."

That gets my attention: I don't think I've ever met a real live alien before, even an ex-alien. "Were you"—

what's the word?—"born that way, or did you emigrate for a while?"

"Two questions." She holds up a finger. "Trade?"

"Trade." I remember to nod without prompting, and my ring sends me a flicker of warmth. It's crude

conditioning: reward behavior indicative of recovery, punish behavior that reinforces the postsurgical

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fugue. I don't like it, but they tell me it's an essential part of the process.

"I emigrated to Zemlya right after my previous memory dump." Something about her expression strikes

me as evasive. What could she be omitting? A failed business venture, personal enemies? "I wanted to

study ghoul society from the inside." Her cocktail emerges from the table, and she takes an experimental

sip. "They're so strange." She looks wistful for a moment. "But after a generation I got . . . sad." Another

sip. "I was living among them to study them, you see. And when you live among people for gigaseconds

on end you can't stop yourself getting involved, not unless you go totally post and upgrade your—well. I

made friends and watched them grow old and die until I couldn't take any more. I had to come back and

excise the . . . the impact. The pain."

Gigaseconds? Thirty planetary years each. That's a long time to spend among aliens. She's studying me

intently. "That must have been very precise surgery," I say slowly. "I don't remember much of my

previous life."

"You were human, though," she prods.

"Yes." Emphatically yes. Shards of memory remain: a flash of swords in a twilit alleyway in the

remilitarized zone. Blood in the fountains. "I was an academic. A member of the professoriat." An array

of firewalled assembler gates, lined up behind the fearsome armor of a customs checkpoint between

polities. Pushing screaming, imploring civilians toward a shadowy entrance—"I taught history." That

much is—was—true. "It all seems boring and distant now." The brief flash of an energy weapon, then

silence. "I was getting stuck in a rut, and I needed to refresh myself. I think."

Which is almost but not quite a complete lie. I didn't volunteer, someone made me an offer I couldn't

refuse. I knew too much. Either consent to undergo memory surgery, or my next death would be my last.

At least, that's what it said I'd 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. "So I had a radical rebuild, and now I can't remember why."

"And you feel like a new human," she says, smiling faintly.

"Yes." I glance at her lower pair of hands. I can't help noticing that she's fidgeting. "Even though I stuck

with this conservative body plan." I'm very conservatively turned out—a medium-height male, dark

eyes, wiry, the stubble of dark hair beginning to appear across my scalp—like an unreconstructed

Eurasian from the pre-space era, right down to the leather kilt and hemp sandals. "I have a strong self-

image, and I didn't really want to shed it—too many associations tied up in there. Those are nice skulls,

by the way."

Kay smiles. "Thank you. And thank you again for not asking, by the way."

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"Asking?"

"The usual question: Why do you look like, well . . ."

I pick up my glass for the first time and take a sip of the bitingly cold blue liquid. "You've just spent an

entire prehistoric human lifetime as an ice ghoul and people are needling you for having too many

arms?" I shake my head. "I just assumed you have a good reason."

She crosses both pairs of arms defensively. "I'd feel like a liar looking like . . ." 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. She's 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 said—berserkers on the prowl for players. "Her,

for example."

"But you were orthohuman once?"

"I still am, inside."

The penny drops: She wears xenohuman drag when she's in public because she's shy. I glance over at the

group and accidentally make eye contact with the blond woman. She looks at me, stiffens, then

pointedlyturns away. "How long has this bar been here?" I ask, my ears burning. How dare she do that

to me?

"About three megs." Kay nods at the group of orthos across the room. "I really would avoid paying

obvious attention to them, they're duelists."

"So am I." I nod at her. "I find it therapeutic."

She grimaces. "I don't play, myself. It's messy. And I don't like pain."

"Well, neither do I," I say slowly. "That's not the point." The point is that we get angry when we can't

remember who we are, and we lash out at first; and a structured, formal framework means that nobody

else needs to get hurt.

"Where do you live?" she asks.

"I'm in the"—she's transparently changing the subject, I realize—"clinic, still. I mean, everything I had,

I"—liquidated and ran—"I travel light. I still haven't decided what to be in this new lifetime, so there

doesn't seem much point in having lots of baggage."

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"Another drink?" Kay asks. "I'm buying."

"Yes, please." 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 surreptitiously loosen my sword in its scabbard. I think I

know what Blondie wants, and I'm perfectly happy to give it to her. She's not the only one around here

prone 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 I'm carrying.

But the postexcision rages aren't 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. Sex has acquired an obsessive

importance I'd almost forgotten. The urges to sex and violence are curiously hard to fight off when you

awaken drained and empty and unable to rememberwho you used to be, but they're a lot less fun, the

second or third time through the cycle of rejuvenation.

"Listen, don't look round, but you probably ought to know that someone is about to—"

Before I can finish the sentence, Blondie leans over Kay's shoulder and spits in my face. "I demand

satisfaction." She has a voice like a diamond drill.

"Why?" 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.

"You exist."

There's a certain type of look some postrehab cases get while they're in the psychopathic dissociative

stage, still reknitting the raveled threads of their personality and memories into a new identity. The

insensate anger at the world, the existential hate—often directed at their previously whole self for

putting them into this world, naked and stripped of memories—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, she's 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 me—Blondie's got no call to intimidate bystanders. And maybe I'm not as out of

control as I feel.

"In that case"—I slowly stand up, not breaking eye contact for a moment—"how about we take this to

the remilitarized zone? First death rules?"

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"Yes," she hisses.

I glance at Kay. "Nice talking to you. Order me another drink? I'll be right back." 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. "After you," she says.

"Au contraire. Challenger goes first."

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 isn't in a

good mood, and it's a very good thing that I'm on the defensive and ready to parry as I go through

because she's waiting, ready to shove her sword through my abdomen on the spot.

She's 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 memories—I can't even remember what sex I was, or how

tall—has a focus, and on the other end of her circling blade, Blondie's 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 she's not leaving me any openings. "Hurry up

and die!" she snaps.

"After you." I feint and try to draw her off-balance, circling round her. Next to the gate we came in

through there's a ruined stump of a tall building, rubble heaped up above head height. (The gate's 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 she's fast. But she's not sly, and she

certainly wasn't expecting the knife in my left hand—taped to my left thigh before—and as she tries to

guard against it, I see my chance and run my sword through her belly.

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She drops her weapon and falls to her knees. I sit down heavily opposite her, almost collapsing. Oh

dear. How did she manage to get my leg? Maybe I shouldn't trust my instincts quite so totally.

"Done?" I ask, suddenly feeling faint.

"I—" There's a curious expression on her face as she holds on to the basket of my sword. "Uh." She tries

to swallow. "Who?"

"I'm Robin," I say lightly, watching her with interest. I'm not sure I've ever watched somebody dying

with a sword through their guts before. There's lots of blood and a really vile smell of ruptured

intestines. I'd have thought she'd be writhing and screaming, but maybe she's got an autonomic override.

Anyway, I'm busy holding my leg together. Blood keeps welling up between my fingers. Comradeship

in pain. "You are . . . ?"

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

"When did you last back up, Gwyn?"

She squints. "Unh. Hour. Ago."

"Well then. Would you like me to end this?"

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

I lean over, grimacing, and pick up her blade. "When did I last back myself up? Since recovering from

memory surgery, you mean?"

She nods, or maybe shudders. I raise the blade and frown, lining it up on her neck: it takes all my

energy. "Good question—"

I slice through her throat. Blood sprays everywhere.

"Never."

I stumble to the exit—an A-gate—and tell it to rebuild my leg before returning me to the bar. It switches

me off, and a subjective instant later, I wake up in the kiosk in the washroom at the back of the bar, my

body remade as new. I stare into the mirror for about a minute, feeling empty but, curiously, at peace

with myself. Maybe I'll be ready for a backup soon? I flex my right leg. The assembler's done a good

job of canonicalizing it, and the edited muscle works just fine. I resolve to avoid Gwyn, at least until

she's in a less insensately violent mood, which may take a long time if she keeps picking fights with her

betters. Then I return to my table.

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Kay is still there, which is odd. I'd expected her to be gone by now. (A-gates are fast, but it still takes a

minimum of about a thousand seconds to tear down and rebuild a human body: that's a lot of bits and

atoms to juggle.)

I drop into my seat. She has bought me another drink. "I'm sorry about that," I say automatically.

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

"You know, I—" I stop. Just for a moment I'm back in that dusty concrete-strewn wasteland, a searing

pain in my leg, the sheer hatred I feel fueling my throw at Gwyn's head. "It's gone," I say. I stare at the

glass, then pick it up and knock back half of it in one go.

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

She's frightened but concerned, I suddenly realize. My parole ring pulses warmth repeatedly. "I don't

mind," I say, and smile, probably a trifle tiredly. I put the glass down. "I'm still in the dissociative phase,

I guess. Before I came out this evening I was sitting in my room all on my own, and I was drawing

pretty lines all over my arms with a scalpel. Thinking about opening my wrists and ending it all. I was

angry. Angry at myself. But now I'm not."

"That's very common." Her tone is guarded. "What changed it for you?"

I frown. Knowing it's a common side effect of reintegration doesn't help. "I've been an idiot. I need to

take a backup as soon as I go home."

"A backup?" Her eyes widen. "You've been walking around here wearing a sword and a dueling sash all

evening, and you don't have a backup?" Her voice rises to a squeak. "What are you trying to do?"

"Knowing you've got a backup blunts your edge. Anyway, I was angry with myself." I stop frowning as

I look at her. "But you can't stay angry forever."

More to the point, I'm suddenly feeling an awful, hollow sense of dread about the idea of rediscovering

who I am, or who I used to be. What does it mean, to suddenly begin sensing other people's emotions

again only after you run someone through with a sword? Back in the dark ages it would have been a

tragedy. Even here, dying isn't something most people take lightly. For a horrible moment I feel the urge

to rush out and find Gwyn and apologize to her—but that's absurd, she won't remember, she'll be in the

same headspace she was in before. She'd probably challenge me to another duel and, being in the same

insensate rage, turn me into hamburger on the spot.

"I think I'm reconnecting," I say slowly. "Do you know somewhere I could go that's safer? I mean, less

likely to attract the attentions of berserkers?"

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"Hmm." She looks at me critically. "If you lose the sword and the sash, you won't look out of place

round the block in one of the phase two recovery piazzas. I know a place that does a really good joesteak

—how hungry are you feeling?"

IN the wake of the duel I have become hungry for food just as my appetite for violence has declined.

Kay takes me to a charmingly rustic low-gee piazza of spun-diamond foam and bonsai redwoods, where

quaint steam-powered robots roast succulent baby hams over charcoal grills. Kay and I chat and it

becomes clear that she's mightily intrigued to see me recovering visibly from the emotional aftereffects

of memory surgery. I pump her for details of life among the ice ghouls, and she quizzes me about the

dueling academies of the Invisible Republic. She has a quirky sense of humor and, toward the end of the

meal, suggests that she knows a party where there's fun to be had.

The party turns out to be a fairly laid-back floating orgy in one of the outpatient apartments. There are

only about six people there when we arrive, mostly lying on the large circular bed, passing around a

water pipe and masturbating each other tenderly. Kay leans me up against the wall just beside the

entrance, kisses me, and does something electrifying to my perineum and testicles with three of her

hands. Then she vanishes into the hygiene suite to use the assembler, leaving me panting. When she

returns I almost don't recognize her—her hair has turned blue, she's lost two arms, and her skin has

turned the color of milky coffee. But she walks right up to me and kisses me again and I recognize her

by the taste of her mouth. I carry her to the bed and, after our first urgent fuck, we join the circle with

the pipe—which is loaded with opium and an easily vaporized phosphodiesterase inhibitor—then

explore each other's bodies and those of our neighbors until we're close to falling asleep.

I'm lying next to her, almost face-to-face, when she murmurs, "That was fun."

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

"I come here regularly," she offers. "You?"

"I haven't—" I pause.

"What?"

"I can't remember when I last had sex."

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

"I can't." I frown. "I must have forgotten it."

"Forgotten? Truly?" She looks surprised. "Could you have had a bad relationship or something? Could

that be why you had surgery?"

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