Glasshouse Read online

  “Good.” She begins to roll over toward me, then pushes herself up on all her arms and climbs across me until she’s on top, hanging there like the spider goddess of earthly delights. “Then we won’t be lying, exactly, if we tell them we aren’t in a long-term relationship. Promise you’ll look me up when we get inside? Or afterward, if you can’t find me? Or if you end up not going inside after all?”

  I stare into her eyes from a distance of millimeters, seeing hunger and desire and insecurity mirrored there. “Yes,” I say, “I promise.”

  The spider goddess approves; she descends to reward her mate, holding him spread-eagled with four arms as she goes to work on him with her mouthparts and remaining limbs. While for his part, the male wonders if this is going to be their last time together.

  AS I make my solitary way home from our assignation, someone tries to murder me.

  I still haven’t taken a backup, despite what I told Piccolo-47. It seems a somewhat irrevocable step, signifying my acceptance of my new state. Backing up your identity adds baggage, just as much as memory excision sheds it. In my case, however, it seems that I really should take a backup as soon as I get back to my room. It would probably hurt Kay if I were to die now and revert to the state I was in before we became involved, and not causing her pain has become important to me.

  Maybe that’s why I survive.

  After we leave the restery we split up, with a shy wave and a glistening look for each other. Kay has a genuine therapy session to go to, and I am trying to hold myself to a routine of reading and research that demands I put in at least ten more kilosecs this diurn. We take our leave reluctantly, raw with new sensibilities. I’m still not sure how I feel, and the thought of going into the experimental polity worries me (will she recognize me? Will I recognize her? Will we care for each other in our assigned new forms and point-scoring roles?), but still, we’re both mature adults. We have independent lives to lead. We can say goodbye if we want to.

  I don’t want company right now (apart from Kay’s), so I tell my netlink to anonymize me as I head home via the graph of T-gates that connect the Green Maze. People reveal themselves to my filtered optic nerves as pillars of fog moving in stately silence, while my own identity is filtered out of their sensory input by their netlinks.

  But not recognizing people is not the same as not knowing somebody is there, and you have to be able to dodge passersby even if you can’t tell who they are. About halfway home I realize that one of the fogpillars is following me, usually a gate or two behind. How interesting, I tell myself as reflexes I didn’t know I had kick in. They’re clearly aware that I’ve got anonymity switched on, and it seems to be giving them a false sense of security. I tell my netlink to tag the fogpillar with a bright red stain and keep my positional sense updated with it. You can do this without breaking anonymity—it’s one of the oldest tricks in the track and trail book. I carry on, taking pains to give no hint that I’ve recognized my shadow.

  Rather than retracing the route we took through the Green Maze, I head directly toward my apartment’s corridor. The fogpillar follows me, and I casually ease my left hand into the big hip pocket on my jacket, feeling my way through the spongy manifold of T-gates inside it until I find the right opening.

  I’m walking along the nave of altars in the temple of the skeletal giants when my tail makes its move. There’s nobody else about right now, which is probably why they pick this particular moment. They lunge toward me, thinking I can’t see them, but the tag my netlink has added to their fogpillar gives them away—I’ve got a running range countdown in my left eye and as soon as they move, I cut the anonymity filter, spin, and draw.

  He’s a small, unremarkable-looking male—nut brown skin, black hair, narrow eyes, wiry build—and he’s wearing a totally unremarkable-looking kilt and vest; in fact the only remarkable thing about him is his sword. It isn’t a dueling sword, it’s a power-assisted microfilament wire, capable of slicing through diamond armor as if it isn’t there. It’s completely invisible except for the red tracking bead that glows at its tip, almost two meters from his right hand.

  Too bad. I brace, squeeze the trigger for a fraction of a second, then let go and try to blink away the hideous purple afterimages. There’s a tremendously loud thunderclap, a vile stench of ozone and burned meat, and my arms hurt. The sword handle goes skittering across the worn flagstones, and I hastily jump out of the way—I don’t want to lose a foot by accident—then I glance about, relying on my peripheral vision to tell me if anyone else is around.

  “Scum!” I hiss in the direction of Mr. Crispy. I feel curiously unmoved by what I’ve just done, although I wish the afterimages would go away faster—you’re supposed to use a blaster with flash-suppression goggles, but I didn’t have time to grab them. The blaster is a simple weapon, just a small T-gate linked (via another pair of T-gates acting as a valve) to an endpoint orbiting in the photosphere of a supergiant star. It’s messy, it’s short-range, it’ll take out anything short of full battle armor, and because it’s basically just a couple of wormholes tied together with superstring, it’s impossible to jam. On the minus side my ears are ringing, I can already feel the skin on my face itching with fresh radiation burns, and I think I melted a couple of the crypts. It’s considered bad form for duelists to use blasters—or indeed anything that isn’t strictly hand-powered—which is probably why he wasn’t expecting it.

  “Never bring a knife to a gun fight,” I tell Mr. Crispy as I turn away from him. His right arm thinks about it for a moment, then falls off.

  The rest of my journey home is uneventful, but I’m shaking, and my teeth are chattering with the aftershock by the time I get there. I shut the door and tell it to fuse with the walls, then drop into the single chair that sits in the middle of my room when the bed isn’t extended. Did he know I hadn’t recorded a backup? Did he realize my older self wouldn’t have erased all my defensive reflexes, or that I’d know where to get hold of a blaster in the Invisible Republic? I’ve no idea. What I do know is someone just tried to kill me by stealth and without witnesses or the usual after-duel resurrection, which suggests that they want me offline while they find and tinker with my backups. Which makes it attempted identity theft, a crime against the individual that most polities rate as several degrees worse than murder.

  There’s no avoiding it now. I’m going to have to take a backup—and then I’m going to have to seek sanctuary inside the Yourdon experiment. As an isolated polity, disconnected from the manifold while the research project runs, it should be about as safe as anywhere can be. Just as long as none of my stalkers are signed up for it . . .

  3

  Nuclear

  TAKING a backup is very easy—it’s dealing with the aftereffects that’s hard.

  You need to find an A-gate with backup capability (which just means that it has a booth big enough to hold a human body and isn’t specifically configured for special applications, like a military gate). There’s one in every rehab apartment, used for making copies of furnishings and preparing dinner as well as deconstructing folks right down to the atomic level, mapping them, and reassembling them again. To make a backup snapshot you just sit down in the thing and tell your netlink to back you up. It’s not instantaneous (it works by brute-force nanoscale disassembly, not wormhole magic), but you won’t notice the possibly disturbing sensation of being buried in blue factory goop, eaten, digitized, and put back together again because your netlink will switch you off as soon as it starts to upload your neural state vector into the gate’s buffer.

  I’m nervous about the time gap. I don’t like the idea of being offline for any length of time while an unknown party is trying to hijack my identity. On the other hand, not to make a backup, complete with my current suspicions, would be foolhardy—if they succeed in nailing me, I want my next copy to know exactly what the score is. (And to know about Kay.) There really isn’t any way around it, so I take precautions. Before I get into the booth, I use the A-gate to run up
some innocuous items that can be combined to make a very nasty booby trap. After installing it, I take a deep breath and stand still for nearly a minute, facing the open door of the booth. Just to steady my nerves, you understand.

  I get inside. “Back me up,” I say. The booth extrudes a seat, and I sit down, then the door seals and flashes up a WORKING sign. I just have time to see blue milky liquid swirling in through the vents at floor level before everything goes gray and I feel extremely tired.

  Now, about those aftereffects. What should happen is that after a blank period you wake up feeling fuzzy-headed and a bit moist. The door opens, and you go and shower off the gel residue left by the gate. You’ve lost maybe a thousand seconds, during which time a membrane studded with about a thousand trillion robotic disassembly heads the size of large protein molecules has chewed through you one nanometer at a time, stripping you down to molecular feedstock, recording your internal state vector, and putting a fresh copy back together behind it as it scans down the tank. But you don’t notice it because you’re brain-dead for the duration, and when the door to the A-gate reopens, you can just pick up your life where you left it before the backup. You naturally feel a bit vague when you come up again, but it’s still you. Your body is—

  Wrong.

  I try to stand up too fast, and my knees both give way under me. I slump against the wall of the booth, feeling dizzy, and as I hit the wall I realize I’m too short. I’m still at the stage of feeling rather than thinking. The next thing I know I’m sitting down again and the booth is uncomfortably narrow because my hips are too wide and I’m too short in the trunk as well. There’s something else, too. My arms feel—odd, not wrong, just different. I lift a hand and put it in my lap, and my thighs feel too big, and then there’s something else. Oh, I realize, sliding my hand between my legs, I’m not male. No, I’m female. I raise my other hand, explore my chest. Female and orthohuman.

  This in itself is no big deal. I’ve been a female orthohuman before; I’m not sure when or for how long, and it’s not my favorite body plan, but I can live with it for the time being. What makes me freak and stand up again, so suddenly I get black spots in my visual field and nearly fall over, is the corollary. Someone tampered with my backup! And then the double take: I am the backup. Somewhere a different version of me has died.

  “Shit,” I say aloud, leaning against the frosted door of the cubicle. My voice sounds oddly unfamiliar, an octave higher and warmer. “And more shit.”

  I can’t stay in here forever, but whatever I’m going to find out when I open the door can’t be good. Steeling myself against a growing sense of dread, I hit the door latch. It’s about then that I realize I’m not wearing anything. That’s no surprise—my manifold jacket was made from T-gates, and T-gates are one of the things that an A-gate can’t fabricate—but my leggings have gone, too, and they were ordinary fabric. I’ve been well and truly hacked, I realize with a growing sense of dread. The door slides open, admitting a gust of air that feels chilly against my damp skin. I blink and glance around. It looks like my apartment, but there’s a blank white tablet on the low desk beside the chair, the booby trap has gone, and the door is back in the wall. When I examine it I see that it’s the wrong color, and the chair isn’t the one I ran up on the apartment gate.

  I look at the tablet. The top surface says, in flashing red letters, READ ME NOW.

  “Later.” I glance at the door, shudder, then go into the bathroom. Whoever’s got me is clearly not in any hurry, so I might as well take my time and get my head together before I confront them.

  The bathrooms in the rehab suites are interchangeable, white ceramic eggs with water and air jets and directionless lighting that can track you wherever you go and drainage ducts and foldaway appliances that live in the walls. I dial the shower up to hot and high and stand under it, shivering with fear, until my skin feels raw and clean.

  I’ve been hacked, and there’s nothing I can do about it except jump through whatever hoops they’ve laid out for me and hope they kill me cleanly at the end or let me go. Resistance, as they say, is futile. If they’ve hacked my backup so deeply that they can force a new body plan on me, then they can do anything they want. Mess with my head, run multiple copies of me, access my private keys, even make a zombie body and use it to do whatever they want it to do while masquerading as me. If they can wake me up in the A-gate of another rehab apartment, then they’ve trapped my state vector. I could run away a thousand times, be tortured to death a hundredfold—and I’d still wake up back in that booth, a prisoner once more.

  Identity theft is an ugly crime.

  Before I leave the bathroom, I take a good look at my new body in the mirror. After all, I haven’t seen it before, and I’ve got a nasty feeling it’ll tell me something about the expectations of my captors.

  It turns out that I’m orthohuman and female all right, but not obtrusively so. I think I’m probably fifteen centimeters shorter than I was, axisymmetrical, with good skin and hair. It’s a pretty good-looking body, but they haven’t forced exaggerated sexual characteristics on me—I’m not a doll. I’ve got wide hips, a narrow waist, breasts that are bigger than I’d have gone for, high cheekbones and full lips, skin that’s paler than I like. My new forehead is clear and high, above Western-style blue eyes with no fold—they look oddly round and staring, almost kawaii—and brown hair that’s currently plastered across my shoulders. My shoulders? It’s that long. Why do I have long hair? My fingernails and toenails are short. I frown. It’s oddly inconsistent. I stretch my arms up over my head and get a nasty shock. I’m weak—I’ve got no upper-body musculature to speak of. I probably couldn’t hold a saber at arm’s length for half a kilosec without dropping it.

  So, in summary, I’m short and weak and unarmed, but cute if your sense of aesthetics centers on old-fashioned body plans. “How reassuring,” I snarl at my reflection. Then I go back into the bedroom, sit down, and look at the tablet. READ ME NOW, it says. “Read to me,” I tell it, and the words morph into new shapes:

  Dear Participant

  Thank you for consenting to take part in the Yourdon-Fiore-Hanta experimental polity project. (If you do not recall giving this consent, tap HERE to see the release form you signed after your last backup.) We hope you will enjoy your stay in the polity. We have prepared an orientation lecture for you. The next presentation will be conducted by Dr. Fiore in 1294 seconds. To assist with maintaining the correct setting, please attend wearing the historically authentic costume supplied (see carton under chair). There will be a cheese and wine reception afterward at which you will be given a chance to meet your fellows in the current intake of participants.

  I blink. Then I reread the tablet, frantically searching for alternate meanings. I didn’t sign that! Did I? Looks like I did—either that or I’ve been hacked, but my having signed the release is more likely. I tap the link, and it’s there in black and white and red, and the sixteen-digit number works when I feed the fingerprint to my netlink. I signed a contract, and it says here I’m committed to living in YFH-Polity under an assumed identity, name of Reeve, for the next . . . hundred megaseconds? Three years? During which time my civil rights will be limited by prior mutual agreement—not extending to my core sentient rights, they’re not allowed to torture or brainwash me—and I can’t be discharged from my obligation without the consent of the experimenters.

  I find myself hyperventilating, as I oscillate between weak-kneed relief that I’m not a victim of identity theft and apprehension at the magnitude of what I’ve signed up for. They have the right to unilaterally expel me (Well, that’s all right, then, I just have to piss them off if I decide I want out), and they have the right to dictate what body I can live in! It’s a ghastly picture, and in among the draconian provisions I see that I also agreed to let them monitor my every action. Ubiquitous surveillance. I’ve just checked into a dark ages panopticon theme hotel! What can possibly have possessed me to—oh. Buried in the small print is a rider titled �
�Compensatory Benefits.”

  Aha.

  Firstly, the Scholastium itself guarantees the experimenters against all indemnities and will back any claims. So if they violate the limited rights they’ve granted me, I can sue them, and they’ve got nearly infinitely deep pockets. Secondly, the remuneration is very satisfactory. I do a brief calculation and work out that what they’ve promised to pay me for three Urth years in the rat run is probably enough to see me in comfort for at least thrice that long once I get out.

  I begin to calm down. I haven’t been hacked; I did this to myself of my own free will, and there are some good sides to the picture. My other self hasn’t completely taken leave of his senses. It occurs to me that it’s going to be very hard for the bad guys, whoever they are, to get at me inside an experimental polity that’s only accessible via a single T-gate guarded by a firewall and the Scholastium’s shock troops.

  I’m supposed to act in character for the historical period we’re pretending to live in, wearing a body that doesn’t resemble me, using an alias and a fake background identity, and not discussing the outside world with anyone else in the study. That means any assassin who comes after me is going to start with huge handicaps, like not knowing what I look like, not being allowed to ask, and not being able to take any weapons along. If I’m lucky, the me who isn’t in here will be able to take care of business within the next hundred megs, and when I come out and we merge our deltas I’ll be home free and rich. And if he doesn’t succeed, well, I can see if they’ll let me keep this assumed identity when I leave . . .

  I pull the carton of clothes out from under the bed and wrinkle my nose. They don’t smell bad or anything, but they’re a bit odd—historically accurate, the tablet said. There’s a strange black tunic, very plain, that leaves my arms and lower legs bare, and a black jacket to wear over it. For footwear there’s a pair of shiny black pumps, implying a strongish grav zone, but with weird, pointed toes and heels that converge to a spike three or four centimeters long. The underwear is simple enough, but I take a while to figure out that the filmy gray hose go on my legs. Which, I notice, are hairless—in fact, I’ve got no hair except on my head. So my body’s ortho, but not undomesticated. I shake my head.