Glasshouse

by Charles Stross

  “Where are you?” I ask. “What’s happening? Calm down and tell me everything.”

  “I need to get away from here,” she insists again, her voice breaking. “He’s crazy! He’s read the manuals and he’s insisting he’s going to get the completion bonus, and if he has to, he’s going to force me to do everything by the book. He went out this morning, locking me in and taking my wallet—he’s still got it—and when he got back, he threatened to beat me up if I didn’t prepare a meal for him. He says that for maximum points the female must obey the male, and if I don’t do what the guidelines say, he’ll beat me up—shit, he’s coming.”

  Click.

  I’m left holding the receiver, staring at the wall behind the bed in horror. I drop it and rush downstairs to the living room. “Sam! We’ve got to do something!”

  Sam looks up from his tablet. “Do what?”

  “It’s K—Cass! She just phoned. She needs help. Her husband is crazy—he’s taken away her wallet, locked her indoors, and is threatening to beat her up if she doesn’t obey him. We’ve got to do something! There’s no way she can defend herself—”

  Sam puts his tablet down. “Are you sure of this?” he asks quietly.

  “Yes! That’s what she told me!” I’m just about jumping up and down, beside myself with fury. (If I ever catch the joker who leeched all my upper body strength, I swear I am going to graft their head to a tree sloth and make them run an endurance race.) “We’ve got to do something!”

  “Like what?” he asks.

  I deflate. “I’m not sure. She wants to get out. But—”

  “Did you check our cumulative score?”

  “My—no, I didn’t. What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Just do it,” he says.

  “Okay.” What is our cohort’s cumulative score? I ask my netlink. The result sets me back. “Hey, we’re doing well! Even after . . .” I falter.

  “Well yes, if you look in the subtotals, you’ll see that we get points, lots of them, for forming ‘stable normative relationships.’ ” His cheek twitches. “Like Cass and, who is it, Mick.”

  “But if he’s hurting her—”

  “Is he really? All right, we take her word for it. But what can we do? If we break them up, we cost everyone in our cohort a hundred points, just like that. Reeve, have you noticed the journal log? Infractions are public. Everyone noticed your little—experiment—at lunchtime. It’s all over their journal, in red digits. Caused quite a stir. If you do something that costs the cohort a stable relationship, some of them—not me, but the ones who will be obsessing with that termination bonus—will start to hate you. And as you pointed out earlier, we’re stuck here for the next hundred megs.”

  “Shit. Shit!” I stare at him. “What about you?”

  He looks up at me from his corner of the sofa, his face impassive. “What about me?”

  “Would you hate me?” I ask, quietly.

  He thinks for a moment. “No. No, I don’t think so.” Pause. “I wish you’d be a little more discreet, though. Lie low, think things through before you act, try to at least look as if you’re planning on fitting in.”

  “Okay. So what should I be thinking? About Cass, I mean. If that scumbag is taking advantage of his greater physical strength . . .”

  “Reeve.” He pauses again. “I agree in principle. But first we must know what we need to do. Can she leave him of her own accord, without our help? If so, then she ought to—it’s her choice. If not, what can we do to help? We have to live with the consequences of our early mistakes for a very long time. Unless Cass is in immediate danger, it would be best to try and get the entire cohort to take action, not go it alone.”

  “But right now, we’ve got to stop him doing anything. Haven’t we?”

  I don’t know what’s come over me. I feel helpless, and I hate it. I should be able to go round to the scumsucker’s house and kick the door down and give him a taste of cold steel in his guts. Or failing that, I ought to plan a cunning two-pronged assault that whisks the victim to safety while booby-trapping his bathroom and putting itching powder in his bed. But I’m just spinning my wheels, venting and emoting and unloading on Sam. My normal network of resources and capabilities is missing, and I’m letting the environment dictate my responses. The environment is set up to inculcate this weird gender-deterministic role play, so I’m . . . I shake my head.

  “We don’t want anyone to get the idea that hurting or imprisoning members of our cohort is a good way to earn points,” Sam says thoughtfully. “Do you have any ideas about how to do that?”

  I think for a moment. “Phone him,” I say, before the idea is completely formed in my head. “Phone him and . . . yeah.” I look out at the garden. “Tell him we’ll see him, and Cass, at Church, the day after tomorrow. There’s no need to be nasty,” I realize. “It says we’re supposed to dress up and look good in Church. It’s a custom thing. Tell him we could lose points if she doesn’t look good. Collectively.” I turn to Sam. “Think he’ll get the message?”

  “Unless he’s very, very stupid.” Sam nods, then stands up. “I’ll call him right away.” He pauses. “Reeve?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re not . . . you’re making me nervous, smiling like that.”

  “Sorry.” I think for a moment. “Sam?”

  “Yes?”

  I’m silent for a few second while I try to work out how much I can safely tell him. After a while I shrug mentally and just say it. I don’t think Sam is likely to be a cold-blooded assassin in the pay of whatever enemies my earlier self made. “I knew Cass. Outside the experiment before we, uh, before we volunteered. If that turd-faced scum hurts her I—well, right now I can’t punch his teeth so far down his throat that he has to eat with his ass, but I’ll think of something else to do. Something equivalent. And, Sam?”

  “Yes?”

  “I can be very creative when it’s time to get violent.”

  5

  Church

  SAM picks up the phone and asks the Gatekeeper to connect him to Mick’s household. I linger at the top of the stairs and listen to him, down in the front hall. It sounds like he’s trying not to lose his temper. After a couple of cents, he puts the phone down hard and stomps back to the living room. I spend most of the rest of the evening avoiding him, instead worrying myself into a black depression at the possibility that I might have made things worse for Cass by getting Sam involved.

  Points. Collective accountability. Stable couples. Peer pressure. My head’s spinning. It’s not that I’m unused to the idea of daily life having rules—at least, in peacetime—but it somehow seems indecent for them to make it so explicit. Societies cohere through tacit understanding, a nod and a wink and—very occasionally—a lookup in a legal database. I’m used to learning how things work as I go along and this experience, a headfirst collision with a fully formed set of rules to live one’s life by, has given me a big shock.

  I speculate that I’d be able to handle things better if I weren’t trapped in a frankly inadequate body. I’m not normally conscious of my own size or strength, and I’m not interested in mesomorphic tinkering—but then again, I would never consciously choose to make myself small and frail. I’m borderline malnourished, too. When I go to the bathroom and use the mirror, I can almost see my ribs under a layer of subcutaneous fat. I’m not used to being a waif, and when I get my hands on whoever did this to me . . . Hah, but I won’t be able to do anything to them, will I? “Assholes,” I mutter darkly, then head for the kitchen to see if there are any high-protein options on offer.

  Later on, I explore the basement. There are a bunch of machines down here that my tablet says are for household maintenance. I puzzle over the clothes washing machine. There’s something very crude and mechanical about it, as if its shape is rigidly fixed. It’s not like a real machine, warm and protean and accommodating to your needs. It’s just a lump of ceramic and metal. It doesn’t even answer when I tell it I need to clean my dress—
it’s really stupid.

  Farther back in the basement there’s something else, a bench with levers attached, for developing upper body muscle mass the hard way. I’m a bit skeptical, but the tablet says these people had to develop musculature by repeatedly lifting weights and other exercises. I find the manual for the exercise machine and after about a kilosecond I manage to reduce myself to a quivering, sweat-smeared jelly. It’s like some kind of psychological torture, a lesson that rams home just how weak I am.

  I stumble upstairs, shower, and collapse into an uneasy sleep, troubled by dreams of drowning and visions of Kay reaching toward me with all her arms outstretched, begging for something I don’t understand. Not to mention faint echoes of something terrible, immigrants pushing and shoving under the gun, begging and screaming to be allowed through the gates of Hel. I startle awake and lie shivering in the darkness for half an hour. What’s happening to me?

  I’m trapped in another universe. It’s true what they say: The past is another polity, but I don’t think most people mean it quite like this.

  THE next morning, I’m in the kitchen trying to puzzle out the instructions for using the coffeemaker when the phone rings. There’s a terminal in the hall, so I go there to pick it up, wondering if something’s wrong. “Call for Sam,” buzzes a flat voice. “Call for Sam.”

  I stare at the handset for a moment, then look up the stairs. “It’s for you!” I yell.

  “I’m coming.” Sam takes the staircase two steps at a time. I pass him the handset. “Yes?” He listens for a moment. “What is—I don’t understand. Can you repeat that? Oh. Yes, yes, I will.” Listening to a conversation on one of these old telephones has an eerie feel. They exist in a strange space, a half-duplex information realm devoid of privacy.

  Sam continues to listen, looking puzzled then annoyed as the instructions continue. Finally, he puts the phone down. “Well!” He says emphatically.

  “I’m trying to cook the coffee,” I tell him. “Come and tell me about it.”

  “They’re sending a taxi. I’ve got half an ‘hour’—that’s nearly two kilosecs, isn’t it?—to get ready.”

  “Who are ‘they’?” I ask. My stomach clenches with anxiety.

  “I’ve been assigned a temporary job,” says Sam. “They’re picking me up for induction training. It’s to show me how the labor system here works. I may be given a different job later.”

  “Huh.” I turn back to the coffee machine so he won’t see me frown. If that’s the hydroxide tank, then this must be the venturi nozzle . . . the disassembled metal bits don’t make any more sense to me than they did before I took it to pieces. “What am I supposed to do? Are they going to assign me a labor duty, too?”

  “I don’t think so.” He pauses. “You can ask for a job, but they don’t expect you to. This one, the manual says it’s a starting point.” He doesn’t look too happy. “We get paid collectively,” he adds after a few seconds.

  “What? You mean they make you work, and I get half of it?”

  “Yes.”

  I shake my head, then screw the machine back together. After a bit I get to the point where it’s making gurgling whining noises and dribbling brown liquid. I stare at it, then wonder, Isn’t it supposed to make a cup first? Silly me, no assemblers! I hastily rummage through the cupboards until I find a couple of cups and jam one under the nozzle. “Stupid, stupid,” I mutter, unsure whether I’m describing myself or the long-dead designers of the machine.

  A taxi shows up in due course, and Sam goes off to his work induction training. I wander around the house for a bit, trying to figure out where everything is and what it does. The washing machine apparently has physical switches you have to set to make it work. It runs on water, and you have to add something called detergent to the clothes, a substitute for properly designed fabrics. After I read about fabrics in the manual Designed for Living, I feel a bit queasy and resolve to only wear artificial ones. There’s something deeply disturbing about wearing clothes made from dead animals. There’s stuff called “silk” that’s basically bug vomit, and the idea of it makes my skin crawl.

  After a couple of hours I get bored. The house is deeply uncommunicative (if this was a real polity, I’d say it was autistic), and the entertainment resources are primitive, to say the least. I try the telephone, thinking I’ll call Cass and see how she’s doing—at a guess, Mick will be undergoing work induction, too, just like Sam—but the phone just makes that idiotic bleeping for a minute or so (I’m trying to adjust to the strange time units the ancients used). Maybe she’s asleep, or shopping. Or could she be dead? For a moment I daydream randomly: After Sam’s call, Mick hit her over the head with the handlebars from an exercise machine and chopped her up in the basement. Or he strangled her while she was asleep . . .

  Why am I harboring these gruesome fantasies? Something is very wrong with me. I feel trapped, that’s a large part of it. I’m isolated here, stuck alone in a suburban house while my husband goes to his assigned job. Which is all wrong because what’s really going on is that there’s an assassin or assassins looking for me because of—because of what? Something that happened before my memory surgery—and I’m isolated, stuck here floundering around in my ignorance.

  I need to get out of here.

  Ten minutes later I’m standing outside the conservatory, wearing my dress-code-violating boots and trousers and with a bag over my shoulder containing my wallet and an extremely sharp knife I found in the kitchen. It’s absolutely pathetic, especially given the shape of my arm muscles (which feel as if I’ve been whacking on them with a hammer), but it’s the best I can do right now. With any luck, the assassins will be in the same situation, and I’ll have time to prepare myself before they’re ready to make their move.

  Item number one on the checklist for the well-prepared fugitive: Know your escape routes.

  I don’t call a taxi. Instead, I walk to the side of the road and look up and down it. The neighborhood is peaceful, if a bit peculiar. Huge deciduous plants grow to either side, and the vegetation gets wild and out of control near the boundaries of the garden associated with our house. Hidden invertebrates make creaking, grating noises like malfunctioning machinery. I try to remember the direction the taxi took us in. That way. I turn left and walk along the side of the road, ready to jump out of the way if a taxi appears suddenly.

  There are other houses along the road. They’re about the same size as mine, clumps of rectangular boxes with glass-fronted openings in frames, sporting oddly tilted upper surfaces. They’re painted a variety of colors but look drab and faded, like dead husks shed by enormous land-going arthropods. There’s no sign of life in any of them, and I guess they’re probably just part of the scenery. I’ve got no idea where Cass lives, and I wish I did. I could go and visit her: For all I know she’s in the next house along from me. But I don’t know, and directory services are only one of the netlink-mediated facilities that are missing here, and Sam is right about one thing—the ancients were incredibly territorial. If they can call the public security forces and detain people simply for wearing the wrong clothes in public, what might they do if I went into someone else’s house?

  A couple of hundred meters along the road, I come to a rise in the ground. The road continues on the level, descending into a deep trench, finally diving into a dark tunnel in the hillside. Looking up the sides I notice that something isn’t quite right about the trees. Gotcha, I think. This must be the edge of a hab module. I can just barely imagine what’s right beneath my feet—complex machinery locked within a skin of structural diamond, a cylinder kilometers long spinning in the void, orbiting in the icy darkness. Emptiness for a few tens of millions of kilometers, then a brown dwarf star little bigger than a gas giant planet, then tens of trillions of kilometers more to the nearest other star system. Scale is the first enemy.

  I walk into the tunnel and see a bend ahead, beyond which it gets very dark. This is disturbing—I didn’t notice it when I was in the back of the taxi
, even though my attention was being grabbed by every weird thing I saw. But if there’s a T-gate in here . . . Well, there’s only one way to find out. I keep my right hand in contact with the tunnel wall as it curves round into darkness. I keep walking slowly ahead, and after maybe fifty meters it begins to bend the other way. I pass another curve, then there’s light from the end of the tunnel, and I’m walking along a road where the buildings to either side are distinctly different in shape and size. There’s a sign ahead that reads: WELCOME TO THE VILLAGE. (A village is a small community; a downtown is the commercial area of a village. At least, I think that’s how it works.)

  I’ve been doing my reading like a good citizen, and there are several places I need to go shopping, starting with a hardware store. The thing is, it seems to me that because these people couldn’t simply order any design patterns they needed out of an assembler, they had to make things themselves from more primitive components. This means “tools,” and it’s surprisingly easy to convert a good basic toolkit into an arsenal of field-expedient weapons. I’m probably safe in here as long as I don’t disclose my identity, but “probably” doesn’t get you very far when the alternative is lethal, and I’m already lying awake at night worrying about it.

  I spend about half an hour in the hardware store, during which time I discover that the operator zombies aren’t programmed to stop females buying axes, crowbars, spools of steel wire, arc-welding rigs, subtractive volume renderers, or just about any other tool I can see. The kit I go for costs quite a bit and is bulky and very heavy, but they say they’ll deliver and install them in our “garage,” an externally accessible sub-building that I haven’t explored yet. I thank them and add some billets of metal feedstock and some lengths of spring steel to the order.

  Walking out of the store with a basic workshop on its way over to my house and an axe hidden in a workman’s holster under my coat, I feel a lot better about the outlook for the near-term future. It’s a bright, warm morning: small feathery dinosaurs are issuing territorial calls from the deciduous plants between the buildings, and for the first time since I arrived I am beginning to feel as if I’m in control of my own destiny.