Glasshouse

by Charles Stross

  It’s my fault for being so distracted. On my way back to my bedroom to get dressed I walk headfirst into Sam. He’s naked and bleary-eyed and looks half-asleep, and I sort of plaster myself across his chest. “Oof,” I say, right as he says, “Are you all right?”

  “I think so.” I push back from him a few centimeters and look up at his face. “I’m sorry. You?”

  He looks worried. “We were going to buy clothes and, uh, stuff. Weren’t we?”

  I realize, momentarily unnerved, that we’re both naked, he’s taller than I am, and he’s hairy all over. “Yes, we were,” I say, watching him warily. All that hair: He’s a lot less gracile than I’d normally go for, and then I realize he’s looking at me as if he’s never seen me before.

  It’s a touchy moment, but then he shakes his head, breaking the tension: “Yes.” He yawns. “Can I go to the bathroom first?”

  “Sure.” I step aside and he shambles past me. I turn to watch him. I don’t know how I feel about this, about sharing a “house” with a stranger who is stronger and bigger than I am and who has a self-confessed history of impulsive violent episodes. But . . . who am I to criticize? By the time I’d known Kay this long, we’d gone to a wild orgy together and fucked each other raw, and if that isn’t impulsive behavior, I don’t know . . . maybe Sam’s right. Sex is an unpleasant complication here, especially before we know what the rules are. If there are rules. Vague memories are trying to surface: I’ve got a feeling I was involved with both males and females back before my excision. Possibly poly, possibly bi—I can’t quite remember. I shake my head, frustrated, and go back to my room to get into costume.

  While I’m getting ready, I pick up my tablet. It tells me to look in the closet in the conservatory. I go downstairs and find the conservatory is chilly—don’t these people have proper life support?—and inside the cupboard that held a T-gate yesterday there’s now a blank wall and a couple of shelves. One of the shelves holds a couple of small bags made of dumb fabric. They’ve got lots of pockets, and when I open one I find it’s full of rectangles of plastic with names and numbers on them. My tablet tells me that these are “credit cards,” and we can use them to obtain “cash” or to pay for goods and services. It seems crude and clumsy, but I pick up the wallets all the same. I’m turning away from the door when my netlink chimes.

  “Huh?” I look round. As I glance at the wallets in my hand a bright blue cursor lights up over them, and my netlink says, TWO POINTS. “What the—” I stop dead. My tablet chimes.

  Tutorial: social credits are awarded and rescinded for behavior that complies with or violates public norms. This is an example. Your social credits may also rise or fall depending on your cohort’s collective score. After termination of the simulation all individuals will receive a payment bonus proportional to their score; the highest-scoring cohort will receive a further bonus of 100% on their final payment.

  “Okay.” I hurry back inside to give Sam his wallet.

  Sam is coming downstairs as I go inside. “Here,” I say, holding both the wallets out to him, “this one is yours. Can you put these in a pocket for me until I buy one of those shoulder bags? I’ve got nowhere to put mine.”

  “Sure.” He takes my stuff. “Did you read the tutorial?”

  “I started to—I needed something to help me get to sleep. Let’s . . . how do we get downtown?”

  “I called a taxi. It’ll be here to pick us up in a short while.”

  “Okay.” I look him up and down. He’s back in costume again. It still looks awkward. I can’t help tapping my toes with impatience. “Clothing, first. For both of us. Where do we go? Do you know how the stuff is sold?”

  “There’s something called a department store, the tutorial said to start there. We might run into some of the others.”

  “Hmm.” A thought strikes me. “I’m hungry. Think there’ll be somewhere to eat?”

  “Maybe.”

  Something large and yellow appears outside the door. “Is that it?” I ask.

  “Who knows?” He looks twitchy. “Let’s go see.”

  The yellow thing is a taxi, a kind of automobile you hire by the centisecond. There’s a human operator up front, and something like a padded bench seat in the rear. We get in, and Sam leans forward. “Can you take us to the nearest department store?” he asks.

  The operator nods. “Macy’s. Downtown zone. That will be five dollars.” He holds out a hand and I notice that his skin is perfectly smooth and he has no fingernails. Is he one of the zombies? I wonder. Sam hands over his “credit card” and the operator swipes it between his fingers, then hands it back. Sam sits back, then there’s a lurch, and we’re moving. The taxi makes various loud noises, so that I’m afraid it’s about to suffer a systems malfunction—there’s a loud rumbling from underneath and a persistent whine up front—but we turn into the road and accelerate toward the tunnel. A moment of darkness, then we’re somewhere else, driving along a road between two short rows of gray-fronted buildings. The taxi stops and the door next to Sam clicks open. “We have arrived at downtown,” says the operator. “Please disembark promptly.”

  Sam is frowning over his tablet, then straightens up. “This way,” he says. Before I can ask why, he heads off toward one of the nearest buildings, which has a row of doors in it. I follow him.

  Inside the store, I get lost fast. There’s stuff everywhere, piled in heaps and stacked in storage bins, and there are lots of people wandering about. The ones in the odd-looking uniforms are shop operators who’re supposed to help you find things and take your money. There are no assemblers and no catalogues, so I suppose they can only sell the stuff they’ve got on display, which is why it’s all over the place. I ask one of the operators where I can find clothes, and she says, “on the third floor, ma’am.” There are moving staircases in a central high-ceilinged room, so I head for the third level and look around.

  Clothes. Lots of clothes. More clothes than I’ve ever imagined in one place—and all of them made of dumb fabric with no obvious way of finding what you want and getting it adjusted to the right size! How did they ever figure out what they needed? It’s a crazy system, just putting everything in the middle of a big house and letting visitors take their chances. There are some other people walking around and fingering the merchandise, but when I approach them they turn out to be zombies, playing the part of real people. None of the others are here yet. I guess we must be early.

  I wander through a forest of racks hung with jackets until I catch a shop operator. “You,” I say. “What can I wear?”

  She looks like an orthohuman female, wearing a blue skirt and jacket and those shoes with uncomfortable heels, and she smiles at me robotically. “What items do you require?” she asks.

  “I need—” I stop. “I need underwear,” I say. The stuff doesn’t clean itself. “Enough for a week. I need some more pairs of hose”—since I tore the one on my left leg—“and another outfit identical to this one. And another set of shoes.” A thought strikes me. “Can I have a pair of pants?”

  “Please wait.” The shop operator freezes. “Please come this way.” She leads me to a lectern near a display of statues wearing flimsy long gowns, and another operator comes out of a door in the wall carrying a bundle of packages. “Here is your order. Pants, item not available in this department. Please identify a template, and we will supply correctly sized garments.”

  “Oh.” I look around. “Can I choose anything here?”

  “Yes.”

  I spend a couple of kiloseconds wandering the shop floor, looking for stuff to wear. They sell very few pants here, and they look damaged—made of a heavy blue fabric, ripped open at the knees. Eventually I end up in another corner of the store where there’s a rack of trousers that look all right, plain black ones with no holes in them. “I want one of these in my size,” I say to the nearest operator, a male one.

  “Item not available in female fitting,” he says.

  “Oh. Great.” I scratch
my head. “Can you alter it?”

  “Item not available in female fitting,” he repeats. My netlink bings. A red icon appears over the rack of pants: SUMPTUARY VIOLATION.

  “Hmm.” So there are restrictions on what they’ll sell to me? This is getting annoying. “Can you provide one in my size fitting? It’s for a male exactly the same size as myself.”

  “Please wait.” I wait, fidgeting impatiently. Eventually another male operator appears from an inconspicuous door in the shop wall, carrying a bundle. “Your gift item is here.”

  “Uh-huh.” I take the pants, suppress a grin, and think about these irritating shoes and how . . . “Take me to the shoe department. I want a pair of shoes in my size fitting, for a male—”

  When I pay using the “credit card,” I score a couple more social points: I’ve made five so far.

  I catch up with Sam down in the furniture department about five kiloseconds later. We’re both massively overloaded with bags, but he’s bought a portable container called a ‘suitcase’ and we shove most of our purchases into it. I’ve bought a shoulder bag and a pair of ankle boots that have soft soles and don’t clatter when I walk—I shoved my old shoes into the bag, just in case I need them for some reason—and I’m a lot more comfortable walking around now. “Let’s go find somewhere to eat,” he suggests.

  “Okay.” There’s an eatery on the other side of the road from Macy’s, and it’s not unlike a real one, except that the food is delivered by human (no, zombie) attendants, and is supposed to be prepared by other humans in the kitchen. Luckily, this is a simulation, or I’d feel quite ill. For deep combat sweeps they teach you how to synthesize food from biological waste or your dead comrades, but that’s different. This is supposed to be civilization, of a kind. We order from a menu printed on a sheet of white film, then sit back to wait for our food. “How did your shopping go?” I ask Sam.

  “Not too badly,” he says guardedly. “I bought underwear. And some trousers and tops. My tablet says there are a lot of social conventions surrounding clothing. Stuff we can wear, stuff we can’t wear, stuff we must wear—it’s a real mess.”

  “Tell me about it.” I tell him about my difficulty ordering trousers that didn’t have holes in them.

  “It says—” He pulls his tablet out. “Ah, yes. Sumptuary conventions. It’s not legally codified, but trousers weren’t allowed for females early in the dark ages, and skirts weren’t allowed for males at all.” He frowns. “It also says the customs appear to have changed sometime around the middle of the period.”

  “You’re going to stick by the book?” I ask him, as a zombie walks up and deposits a glass of pale yellow liquid called beer next to each of our settings.

  “Well, they can always fine us,” he says, shrugging. “But I suppose you’re right. We don’t have to do anything we’re not comfortable with.”

  “Right.” I hike my right leg up and put my foot on the table. “Look at this.”

  “It’s a heavy boot.”

  “A boot from the males-only department. But they sized it for me when I told them it was a gift for a male the same size as me.”

  “Oh?”

  I realize I’m showing the leg with the torn hose and put it back under the table. “We’ve got some autonomy, however limited. Now we’re in here, we can live however we want, can’t we?”

  Plates of food arrive—synthetic steaks, fake vegetables designed to look as if they’d grown in a muddy corner of a wild biosphere, and cups of brightly colored condiments. For a while I busy myself with my plate. I’m really hungry, and the food is flavorsome, if a bit basic. At least we’re not going to starve in here. I fill up quickly.

  “I don’t know if we can,” Sam mumbles around a full mouth. “I mean, the points system—”

  “Doesn’t stop us doing anything,” I interrupt, sliding my plate away. “All we have to do is to agree to ignore it, and we can do whatever we want.”

  “I suppose so.” He forks another piece of steak into his mouth.

  “Anyway, we’ve got no idea what they take to be a violation of the system. I mean, what do I have to do to lose a point? Or to gain points? They haven’t actually told us anything, they’ve just said ‘obey the rules and collect points.’ ” I stab my fork in his direction. “We’ve got these reference texts in our tablets, all this stuff about how it’s a genetically determinist society and there are all these silly customs, but I don’t see how that can affect us unless we let it. All societies have some degree of flexibility, but these guys have just picked the first narrowly normative interpretation that came to hand. If you ask me, they’re just plain lazy.”

  “What will the others think?” he asks.

  “What will they think?” I stare at him. “We’re here for a hundred megs. Do you really think they’ll put a bonus payment at the end of the experiment ahead of, say, having to wear stupid pointy shoes that make your feet hurt for three years?”

  “It depends.” Sam puts his knife down. “It all depends on how they balance the relative convenience of making other people uncomfortable against their own future wealth.” His expression is pensive. “The protocol is . . . interesting.”

  “Okay.” I stand up. “Let’s test it.” I shrug out of my jacket and lay it over the back of my chair. A couple of the dining zombies look round. “Hey, look at me!” I yell. I unzip my dress and drop it around my ankles. Sam is startled. I watch his face as I reach behind my back and unlatch my breast halter, drop it, then step up onto my chair and push down my hose and G-string. “Look at me!” Sam looks up, and my face feels hot as I see his expression—

  Then there’s a red flash that blots out my visual field, and a loud chime from my netlink, like the decompression alert we all learn to fear before we can walk. MINUS TEN POINTS FOR PUBLIC NUDITY, says the link.

  When my vision clears, I can see waitrons and the maître d’ rushing toward me holding up towels and aprons, ready to do something, anything, to cover the horrible sight. Sam is still looking up at me, and I’m not the only one who’s blushing. I climb down off the chair and three or four male zombies, all bigger than me, converge and between them pin my arms and carry me bodily into the back. I bite back a scream of fright: I can’t move! But they take me straight to the females-only lavatory and simply shove me through the door, on my own. A moment later, while I’m still trying to catch my breath, the door whips open and someone throws my discarded clothes at me.

  Minus ten points, causing a public nuisance, intones my netlink. Police have been summoned. Help function advises you to correct your dress code infraction and leave.

  Oh shit, shit . . . I scrabble around for a moment, pulling the dress over my head and then shrugging into the jacket. Underwear can wait—I don’t know what these “police” are, but they don’t sound good. I pull the door open and glance round the corner but there’s nobody about, nothing but a short corridor with doors back to the restaurant and one that says FIRE ESCAPE in green letters. I shove it open and find myself standing in a narrow road with lots of wheeled containers. It stinks of decaying food. Shaking slightly, I walk to the end, then turn left, and left again.

  Back on the road I walk right into Sam. “Now will you take the protocol seriously?” he hisses in my ear. “They nearly arrested me!”

  “Arrested? What’s that?”

  “The police.” He’s breathing heavily. “They can take you away, lock you up. Detention, it’s called.” He’s still flushed in the face and clearly concerned. “You could have been hurt.”

  I shiver. “Let’s go home.”

  “I’ll call a taxi,” he says grumpily. “You’ve done enough damage for one day.”

  SAM has bought a thing called a cell phone—a pocket-sized replacement for the blocky network terminal wired into the wall. He keeps it in a pocket. He speaks to it for a while, and a few cents later a taxi pulls up. We go home, and he stomps into the living room, leaving the suitcase in the front hall, and turns on the television. I tiptoe around
for a while before looking in on him to find that he’s engrossed in the football, a faintly puzzled expression on his face.

  I spend some time in my bedroom, reading from my own tablet. It’s got lots of advice about how people lived in the dark ages, none of which makes much sense—most of what they did sounds arbitrary and silly when you strip it of the surrounding social context and the history that explains how their customs developed. The way my experiment in the restaurant backfired still burns me (how can not wearing clothes be so harmful in any rational social context?), but after a while I realize that I didn’t get zapped this morning when I went around the house naked. So I take off my new boots, then my dress, which is beginning to get a bit whiffy. I go downstairs and open the suitcase, take out my purchases, and carry them up to my room. I stash them in the wardrobe, but there’s enough space for ten times as much stuff, which leaves me puzzled. But I don’t feel like trying the new costumes on right now. In fact, I feel like shit. Sam is ignoring me pointedly (a defensive reaction, I think), we’re living in a crazy experiment that doesn’t make sense, and I won’t even get a chance to find out if everyone else thinks it’s mad until the day after tomorrow.

  I’m reading the tablet’s explanation of how vocations—excuse me, “work”—worked in dark ages society, boggling slightly, when a bell rings from the low table next to my bed. I look toward it and my tablet flashes: ANSWER THE PHONE.

  Oh. I didn’t realize I had one. I fumble around for a while then find the chunky gadget on a cord that you’re supposed to hold to your face. “Yes?” I say.

  “R-Reeve! Is that you?”

  “Cass? Kay?” I ask, blanking on names for a moment.

  “Reeve! You’ve got to help me get out of here! He’s crazy. If I stay here, I’m sure he’s going to end up hitting me again. I need somewhere to go.” I’ve heard panic before, and this is it. Cass (Kay? a little corner of me insists) is desperate. But why?