Glasshouse (32 page)

“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.

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.

“Ssh. It's around lunchtime, and everything's all right.”

“If it's all right”—Sam squeezes my hand—“how long have you been sitting there?”

“Not long.”

I open my eyes and look at him. He's on the stool beside my bed. I pull a face, or smile, or something. “Liar.”

He doesn't smile or nod but the tension drains out of him like water and he sags as it runs away. “Reeve? Can you remember?”

I blink rapidly, trying to get some dust out of a corner of my left eye.
Can I remember
—“I remember lots,” I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter. Just trying to sort it out makes my head hurt! I'm a tank: I'm a dissolute young bioaviator with a death wish: Maybe I'm a sad gamer case instead, or a deep-cover agent. But all of these possibilities are a whole lot sillier and less plausible than what everything around me is saying, which is that I'm a small-town librarian who's had a nervous breakdown. I decide I'll go with that version for the time being. I hold Sam's hand tight, like I'm drowning: “How bad was it?”

“Oh Reeve, it was bad.” He leans across me, and hugs me and I hug him back as tight as I can. “It was bad as can be.” He's shaking, I realize with a sense of growing awe.
He feels for me that deeply?
“I was afraid I was going to lose you.”

I nuzzle into the base of his neck. “That would be bad.” It's my turn to shudder with a frisson of existential dread at the thought that
I
could have lost
him
. Somewhere in the past week Sam has turned into my anchor, my refuge in the turbulent waters of identity. “I've got . . . well. Things are a bit jumbled today. What happened? When did you hear . . . ?”

“I came as soon as I could,” he mumbles in my ear. “Last night they called but said I couldn't visit, it was too late.” He tenses.

“And?” I prompt. I feel as if there should be something more.

“You were fitting.” He's still tense. “Dr. Hanta said it's an acute crisis; you needed a fixative, but she couldn't do it without your permission. I told her to give it anyway, but she refused.”

“A fixative? What for?”

“Your memories.” He's even tenser. I let go of him, feeling cold.

“What does this fixative do?”

Dr. Hanta answers from behind me as I turn round to look at her. “Memory is encoded in a number of ways, as differential weightings in
synaptic connections and also as connections between different nerves. The last excision and redaction you underwent was faulty. You began to experience breakthrough. In turn, that was triggering alerts in your enhanced immune system, and then you got yourself exposed to a mechanocytic infestation, which made things much worse. Whenever new associative traces would start integrating, your endogenous robophages would decide it was a mechanocyte signal and kill the nerve cells. You were well on your way to losing the ability to form new long-term associative traces—progressive brain damage. The fixative is normally used as the last step in redactive editing. I used it to renormalize, erase, the old memories that were breaking through. I'm sorry, but you won't be able to access them now—you keep those that you've already integrated, but the others are gone for good.”

Sam has loosened his grip on me, and I lean against him as I stare at the doctor. “Did I give you permission to mess with my mind?” I ask.

Hanta just looks at me.

“Did I?” I echo myself. I feel aghast.
If she did it against my will, that's
—

“Yes,” says Sam.

“What?”

“She—you were pretty far gone.” He hunches over again. “She was describing the situation to you, and me, and I was asking her to do it, and she said she couldn't—then you were delirious. You began mumbling and she asked you, and you said yes.”

“But I don't remember . . .” I stop. I think I do remember, sort of.
But I can't be sure, can I?
“Oh.”

I stare at Hanta. I recognize the expression in her eyes. I stare at her for a long time—then I manage to make myself nod, just a quick jerk really, but it's enough to break contact, and I think we all breathe out simultaneously. Meanwhile I'm thinking,
Shit, I'll never be able to figure out where I've come from now, will I?
But it's not as bad as what was going to happen otherwise. I don't remember the attacks, exactly, but I remember what happened between them, the consequences—it's a consistent story. A new story of my life, I suppose. “I feel much better,” I say cautiously.

Sam laughs, and there's a raw edge in it that borders on hysteria. “You feel better?” He hugs me again, and I hug him right back. Hanta is smiling, with what I think is relief at a difficult situation resolved. The suspicious paranoid corner of me files it away for future reference, but even my secret-agent self is willing to concede that Hanta might actually be what she seems, an ethically orthodox practitioner with only the best interests of her patients at heart. Which is a big improvement on Fiore or the Bishop, but at least one out of three isn't bad.

“So when can I go home?” I ask expectantly.

IT
turns out that I'm stuck in hospital for the rest of the day and the next night, too. Hospital life is tedious, punctuated by the white-clad ghosts wheeling around trolleys of food and different things, instruments and dark age potions.

I still ache from the fever, and I feel weak, but I'm well enough to get up and go to the bathroom on my own. On my way back I notice that the curtains around the other occupied bed on the ward are drawn back. I glance around, but there are no nurses present. Steeling myself, I approach.

It is Cass, and she's a mess. Her legs are encased in bright blue polymer tubes from toe to thigh, and raised by wires so that the bedding dangles across her in a kind of valley. The bruises on her face have faded to an ugly green and yellow except around her eye sockets, which look simultaneously puffy and hollow, her eyelids sagging closed. She's still thin, and a translucent bag full of fluid is slowly draining into her wrist through a pipe.

“Cass?” I say softly.

Her eyes open and roll toward me. “Guuh,” she says.

“What?” She flinches slightly. I hear footsteps behind me. “Are you all right?”

The nursing zombie approaches. “Please step away from the patient. Please step away from the patient.”

“How is she?” I demand. “What have you done to her?”

“Please step away from the patient,” says the nurse, then a different
reflex triggers: “All questions should be addressed to medical authorities. Thank you for your compliance. Go back to bed.”

“Cass—” I try a last time. Gross memory surgery falls through my mind like a snowflake, freezing everything it touches. I feel awful. “Are you there, Cass?”

“Go back to bed,” says the nurse, a touch threateningly.

“I'm going, I'm going,” I say, and I shuffle away from poor, damaged Cass. Cass who I thought was Kay, obsessing over her, when all the time Kay was sleeping in the next room, and Cass was living in a nightmare.

I have a problem with the ethics here, I think. Hanta's not bad. But she collaborates with Fiore and Yourdon. What kind of person would do that? I shake my head, wincing at the cognitive dissonance. One who'd perform illegal memory surgery then implant the recollection of giving informed consent in the victim's mind? I shake my head again. I don't really think Hanta would do that, but I
can't
be sure. If the patient agrees with the practitioner afterward, is it really abuse?

IT'S
a bright, sunny Thursday morning when Hanta comes and sits by my bedside with a clipboard. “Well!” Her smile is fresh and approving. “You've done really well, Reeve. A splendid recovery. I think you're about well enough to go home.” She uses her pen to scribble an annotation on her board. “You're still convalescent, so I advise you to take it very easy for the next few days—certainly you shouldn't go back to work until this time next week at the earliest, and ideally not until the Monday afterward. Take this note and give it to Janis when you return to work, it's a certificate of exemption from employment. If you feel at all unwell, or have another dizzy spell, I want you to telephone the hospital immediately, and we'll send an ambulance for you.”

“Will the ambulance be much use if I'm incoherent or hallucinating?” I ask doubtfully.

Hanta shoves an unruly lock of hair back into place: “We're still populating the polity,” she says. “The paramedics aren't due to arrive until next week. They have to have additional skill set upgrades to their
implants. But in two weeks' time if you call an ambulance or see a nurse or need a police officer, you won't be dealing with a zombie.” She glances along the ward. “Can't happen soon enough, if you ask me.”

“I was meaning to ask . . .” I trail off, unsure how to raise the subject, but Dr. Hanta knows what I'm talking about.

“You did the right thing when you called the ambulance,” she says firmly. “Never doubt that.” She touches my arm for emphasis. “But zombies are no use for nonroutine circumstances.” A little sigh. “It'll be much easier when I have human assistants who can learn on the job.”

“How big is the polity going to grow?” I ask. “The original briefing said something about ten cohorts of ten, but if you're going to have police and ambulance crews, surely that's not enough?”

She looks surprised. “No, a hundred participants is just the size of the comparison set for score renormalization, Reeve, a single parish. We introduce participants to each other in a controlled manner, ten cohorts to a parish, but you're nearly all settled in now. Next week is when we open the manifold and link all the neighborhoods together. That's when YFH-Polity actually comes into existence! It's going to be quite exciting—you're going to meet strangers, and there'll be far fewer zombies.”

“Wow,” I say, my voice hollow and my head spinning. “How many, uh, neighborhoods, are you planning to link in?”

“Oh, thirty or so parishes. That's enough to form one small city, which is about the minimum for a stable society, according to our models.”

“Keeping track of that must be a big job,” I say slowly.