Glasshouse (6 page)

There are seven or eight other people already inside a big room, with several rows of uncomfortable-looking chairs drawn up before a podium that stands before a white-painted wall. We—I've got to get used to the idea that I'm a voluntary participant, even if I don't feel like one right now—are a roughly even mix of orthohuman males and females, all in historical costume. The costume seems to follow an intricate set of rules about who's allowed to wear what garments, and everybody is wearing a surprising amount of fabric, given that we're in a controlled hab. Those of us who are female have been given one-piece dresses or skirts that fall to the knee, in combination with tops that cover our upper halves. The men are wearing matching jacket and trouser combinations over shirts with some sort of uncomfortable-looking collar and scarf arrangement at the neck. Most of the clothing is black and white or gray and white, and remarkably drab.

Apart from the archaic costume there are other anomalies—none of the males have long hair, and none of the females have short hair, at least where I can see it. A couple of heads turn as I walk in, but I don't feel out of place, even with my long hair yanked back in a ponytail. I'm just another anonymous figure in historic drag. “Is this the venue for the lecture?” I ask the nearest person, a tall male—probably no taller
than I used to be, but I find myself looking up at him from my new low vantage—with black hair and a neatly trimmed facial mane.

“I think so,” he says slowly, and shrugs, then looks uncomfortable. Not surprising, as his outfit looks as if it's strangling him slowly. “Did you just come through? I found a
READ ME
in my room after my last backup—”

“Yeah, me, too,” I say. I clutch the tablet under my arm and smile up at him. I can recognize nervous chatter when I hear it and Big Guy looks every bit as uneasy as I feel. “Do you remember signing, or did you do that after your backup, too?”

“I'm not the only one?” He looks relieved. “I was in rehab,” he says hastily. “Coming out of the crazy patch you go through. Then I woke up here—”

“Yeah, whatever.” I nod, losing interest. “Me too. When is it starting?”

A door I hadn't noticed before opens in the white wall at the back and a plump male ortho walks in. This one is wearing a long white coat held shut with archaic button fasteners up the front, and he waddles as he walks, like a fat, self-satisfied amphibian. His hair is black and falls in lank, greasy-looking locks on either side of his face, longer than that of any of the other males here. He walks to the podium and makes a disgusting throat-clearing noise to get our attention.

“Welcome! I'm glad you agreed to come to our little introductory talk today. I'd like to apologize for requiring you to come in person, but because we're conducting this research project under rigorous conditions of consistency, we felt we should stay within the functional parameters of the society we are simulating. They'd do it this way, with a face-to-face meeting, so . . . if you would all like to take seats?”

We take a while to sort ourselves out. I end up in the front row, sitting between Big Guy and a female with freckled pale skin and coppery red hair, not unlike Linn, but wearing a cream blouse and a dark gray jacket and skirt. It's not a style I can make any sense of—it's vertically unbalanced and, frankly, a bit weird. But it's not that different from what they've given me to wear, so I suppose it must be historically accurate.
Have our aesthetics changed that much?
I wonder.

The person on the podium gets started. “I am Major-Doctor Fiore, and I worked with Colonel-Professor Yourdon on the design of the experimental protocol. I'm here to start by explaining to you what we're trying to achieve, albeit—I hope you'll understand—leaving out anything that might prejudice your behavior within the trial polity.” He smiles as if he's just cracked a private joke.

“The first dark ages.” He throws out his chest and takes a deep breath when he's about to say something he thinks is significant. “The first dark ages lasted about three gigaseconds, compared to the seven gigaseconds of the censorship wars. But to put things in perspective, the first dark ages neatly spanned the first half of the Acceleration, the so-called late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries in the chronology of the time. If we follow the historical record forward from the pretechnological era into the first dark age, we find we're watching humans who lived like technologically assisted monkeys—very smart primates with complex mechanical tools, but basically unchanged since the species first emerged. Then when we look at the people who emerged from the first dark age, we find ourselves watching people not unlike ourselves, as we live in the modern era, the ‘age of emotional machines' as one dark age shaman named it. There's a gap in the historical record, which jumps straight from carbon ink on macerated wood pulp to memory diamond accessible via early but recognizable versions of the intentionality protocols. Somewhere in that gap is buried the origin of the posthuman state.”

Big Guy mutters something under his breath. It takes me a moment to decode it:
What a pompous oaf.
I stifle a titter of amusement because it's no laughing matter. This pompous oaf holds my future in his hands for the next tenth of a gigasec. I want to catch his next words.

“We know why the dark age happened,” Fiore continues. “Our ancestors allowed their storage and processing architectures to proliferate uncontrollably, and they tended to throw away old technologies instead of virtualizing them. For reasons of commercial advantage, some of their largest entities deliberately created incompatible information formats and locked up huge quantities of useful material in them, so that when new architectures replaced old, the data became inaccessible.

“This particularly affected our records of personal and household activities during the latter half of the dark age. Early on, for example, we have a lot of
film
data captured by amateurs and home enthusiasts. They used a thing called a cine camera, which captured images on a photochemical medium. You could actually decode it with your eyeball. But a third of the way into the dark age, they switched to using magnetic storage tape, which degrades rapidly, then to digital storage, which was even worse because for no obvious reason they encrypted everything. The same sort of thing happened to their audio recordings, and to text. Ironically, we know a lot more about their culture around the beginning of the dark age, around old-style year 1950, than about the end of the dark age, around 2040.”

Fiore stops. Behind me a couple of quiet conversations have broken out. He seems mildly annoyed, probably because people aren't hanging on his every word. Me, I'm fascinated—but I used to be an historian, too, albeit studying a very different area.

“Will you let me continue?” Fiore asks pointedly, glaring at a female in the row behind me.

“Only if you tell us what this has got to do with us,” she says cheekily.

“I'll—” Fiore stops. Again, he takes a deep breath and throws his shoulders back. “You're going to be living in the dark ages, in a simulated Euromerican cultura like those that existed in the period 1950–2040,” he snaps. “I'm
trying
to tell you that this is our best reconstruction of the environment from available sources. This is a sociological and psychological immersion experiment, which means we'll be watching how you interact with each other. You get points for staying in character, which means obeying the society's ground rules, and you lose points for breaking role.” I sit up. “Your individual score affects the group, which means everyone. Your cohort—all ten of you, one of the twenty groups we're introducing to this section of the polity over the next five megs—will meet once a week, on Sundays, in a parish center called the Church of the Nazarene, where you can discuss whatever you've learned. To make the simulation work better, there are a lot of nonplayer characters, zombies run by the Gamesmaster, and for
much of the time you'll be interacting with these rather than with other experimental subjects. Everything's laid out in a collection of hab segments linked by gates so they feel like a single geographical continuum, just like a traditional planetary surface.”

He calms down a little. “Questions?”

“What are the society's ground rules?” asks a male with dark skin in a light suit from the back row. He sounds puzzled.

“You'll find out. They're largely imposed through environmental constraints. If you need to be told, we'll tell you via your netlink or one of the zombies.” Fiore sounds even more smug.

“What are we meant to do here?” asks the redhead in the seat beside me. She sounds alert if a little vague. “I mean, apart from ‘obey the rules.' A hundred megs is a long time, isn't it?”

“Obey the rules.” Fiore smiles tightly. “The society you're going to be living in was formal and highly ritualized, with much attention paid to individual relationships and status often determined by random genetic chance. The core element in this society is something called the nuclear family. It's a heteromorphic structure based on a male and a female living in close quarters, usually with one of them engaging in semi-ritualized labor to raise currency and the other preoccupied with social and domestic chores and child rearing. You're expected to fit in, although child rearing is obviously optional. We're interested in studying the stability of such relationships. You'll find your tablets contain copies of several books that survived the dark ages.”

“Okay, so we form these, uh, nuclear families,” calls a female from the back row. “What else do we need to know?”

Fiore shrugs. “Nothing now. Except”—a thought strikes him—“you'll be living with dark ages medical constraints. Remember that! An accident can kill you. Worse, it can leave you damaged: You won't have access to assemblers during the experiment. You really don't want to try modifying your bodies, either; the medical technology that exists is quite authentically primitive. Nor will you have access to your netlinks from now on.” I try to probe mine, but there's nothing there. For a panicky moment I wonder if I've gone deaf, then I realize,
He's telling the truth! There's no network here.
“Your netlinks will communicate social
scoring metrics to you, and nothing else. There
is
a primitive conversational internetwork between wired terminals here, but you aren't expected to use it.

“We've laid on a buffet outside this room. I suggest you get to know each other, then each pick a partner and go through that door”—he points to a door at the other side of the white wall—“which will gate you to your primary residence for in-processing. Remember to take your slates so you can read the quickstart guide to dark ages society.” He looks around the room briefly. “If there are no more questions, I'll be going.”

A hand or two goes up at the back, but before anyone can call out, he turns and dives through the door he came in. I look at Redhead.

“Huh, I guess that's us told,” she says. “What now?”

I glance at Big Guy. “What do
you
think?”

He stands up. “I think we ought to do like he said and eat,” he says slowly. “And talk. I'm Sam. What are you called?”

“I'm R-Reeve,” I say, stumbling over the name the tablet said I should use. “And you,” I add glancing at redhead, “are . . . ?”

“You can call me Alice.” She stands up. “Come on. Let's see who else is here and get to know them.”

OUTSIDE
the lecture theatre there are two long tables heaped with plates of cold finger food, fruit and “cheese”—strong-smelling curds fermented from something I can't identify—and glasses of wine. Five of us are male and five of us are female, and we partition into two loose clumps at either table, at opposite sides of the room. Besides Alice the redhead there's Angel (dark skin and frizzy hair), Jen (roundish face, pale blond hair, even curvier than I am), and Cass (straight black hair, coffee-colored skin, serious eyes). We're all looking a little uncomfortable, moving in jerks and tics, twitchy in our new bodies and ugly clothes. The males are Sam (whom I met), Chris (the dark-skinned male from the back row), El, Fer, and Mick. I try to tell them apart by the color of their suits and neckcloths, but it's hard work, and the short hair gives them all a mechanical, almost insectile, similarity.
It must have been a very conformist age,
I think.

“So.” Alice looks round at our little group and smiles, then picks a cube of yellowish ‘cheese' from her woodpulp plate and chews it thoughtfully. “What are we going to do?”

Angel produces her tablet from a little bag that she hangs over her arm. If I had one, I didn't notice it, and I kick myself mentally for not thinking of improvising something like that. “There's a reading list here,” she says, carefully tapping through it. I watch over her shoulder as scrolls dissolve into facsimile pages from ancient manuscripts. “There's that odd word again. What's a ‘wife'?”

“I think I know that one,” says Cass. “The, uh, family thing. Where there were only two participants, and they were morphologically locked, the female participant was called a ‘wife' and the male was called a ‘husband.' It implies sexual relations, if it's anything like ice ghoul society.”

“We aren't supposed to talk about the outside,” Jen says uncomfortably.