Glasshouse

by Charles Stross

  JANIS is skinny and blond, with a haggard, worried-looking expression and long, bony hands that flutter like trapped insects as she describes things. After having to put up with Jen’s machinations, she’s like a breath of fresh air. On my first day I arrive at my new job early, but Janis is already there. She whisks me into a dingy little staff room round the back of one of the bookcases that I’d never suspected existed on yesterday’s tour.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” she tells me, clasping her hands. “Tea? Or coffee? We’ve got both”—there’s an electric kettle in the corner and she switches it on—“but someone’s going to have to run out and fetch some milk soon.” She sighs. “This is the staff room. When there’s nobody about, you can take your breaks here or go out for lunch—we close between noon and one o’clock—and there’s also a terminal into the library computer.” She points at a boxy device not unlike a baby television set, connected by a coiled cable to a panel studded with buttons.

  “The library has a computer?” I say, intrigued. “Can’t I just use my netlink?”

  Janis flushes, her cheeks turning pink. “I’m afraid not,” she apologizes. “They make us use them just like the ancients would have, through a keyboard and screen.”

  “But I thought none of the ancient thinking machines survived, except in emulation. How do we know what its physical manifestation looked like?”

  “I’m not sure.” Janis looks thoughtful. “Do you know, I hadn’t thought of that? I’ve got no idea how they designed it! It’s probably buried in the experimental protocol somewhere—the nonclassified bits are all online, if you want to go looking. But listen, we don’t have time for that now.” The kettle boils, and she busies herself for a minute pouring hot water into two mugs full of instant coffee granules. I study her indirectly while her back’s turned. There’s not much sign of her pregnancy yet, although I think there might be a slight bulge around her waist—her dress is cut so that it’s hard to tell. “First, I want to get you started on how the front desk works, on the lending side. We’ve got to keep track of who’s borrowed what books, and when they’re due back, and it’s the easiest thing to start you on. So”—she hands me a coffee mug—“how much do you know about library work?”

  I learn over the course of the morning that “library work” covers such an enormous area of information management that back during the dark ages, before libraries became self-organizing constructs, people used to devote their entire (admittedly short) lives to studying the theory of how best to manage them. Neither Janis—nor I—is remotely qualified to be a real dark age librarian, with their esoteric mastery of catalogue systems and controlled information classification vocabularies, but we can run a small municipal lending library and reference section with a bit of scurrying around and a lot of patience. I seem to have some historic skills in that direction, and unlike my experience with arc welding, I haven’t erased all of them. I can remember my alphabet and grasp the decimal classification scheme immediately, and the way each book has a ticket in an envelope inside the front cover that has to be retained when it’s loaned out makes sense, too . . .

  It’s only by midafternoon, when we’ve taken a grand total of five returns and had one visitor who borrowed two books (on Aztec culture and the care and feeding of carnivorous plants), that I begin to wonder why YFH-Polity needs anything as exotic as a full-time librarian.

  “I don’t know,” Janis admits over a cup of tea in the staff room, her feet stretched out under the rickety white-painted wooden table. “It can get a bit busy—wait until six o’clock, when most people are on their way home from work, that’s when we get most of our borrowers—but really, they don’t need me. A zombie could do the job perfectly well.” She looks pensive. “I suspect it’s more to do with finding employment for people who ask for it. It’s one of the drawbacks of the entire experiment. We don’t exist in a closed-circuit economy, and if they don’t constantly provide jobs for people, it’ll all fall apart. So what we’re left with is a situation where they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. At least until they merge the parishes.”

  “Merge the—there are more?”

  “So I’m told.” She shrugs. “They’re introducing us in small stages, so that we know who our neighbors are before we get linked into a large community and everything goes to pieces.”

  “Isn’t that a bit of a pessimistic attitude?” I ask.

  “Maybe so.” She flashes me a rare grin. “But it’s a realistic one.”

  I think I’m going to like Janis, her ironic sense of humor notwithstanding: I feel comfortable around her. We’re going to work well together. “And the other stuff? The restricted archive? The computer?”

  She waves it off. “All you need to know is, once a week Fiore comes and we unlock the closed room and leave him alone in it for an hour or two. If he wants to take any papers away, we log them and nag him until he brings them back.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Well.” She looks thoughtful. “If the Bishop shows up, you give him access to all areas.” She pulls a face. “And don’t ask me about the computer, nobody told me much about how to use it, and I don’t really understand the thing, but if you want to tinker with it during a slack period, be my guest. Just remember everything is logged.” She catches my eye. “Everything,” she repeats, with quiet emphasis.

  My pulse quickens. “On the computer? Or off it?”

  “Book withdrawals,” she says. “Possibly even what pages people look at. You notice they’re all hardcovers? You’d be surprised how small even the dark age technés could make a tracking device. You could build them into book spines, able to sense which pages the reader was opening the book to. All without violating protocol.”

  “But protocol—” I stop. The television doesn’t look very complex, technically, but is it? Really? What goes into a machine like that? There must be either cameras or a really complex rendering system . . .

  “The dark ages weren’t just dark, they were fast. We’re talking about the period when our ancestors went from needing an abacus to add two numbers together to building the first emotional machines. They went from witch doctors with poisonous chemicals—who couldn’t even reattach a cleanly severed limb—to tissue regeneration, full control of the proteome and genome, and growing body parts to order. From using rockets to get into orbit to the first tethered lift systems. And they did all that in less than three gigs, ninety old-time years.”

  She pauses for a sip of tea. “It is very easy for us moderns to underestimate the dark age orthos. But it’s a habit you’ll shed after you’ve been here for a while, and to give them their due, the clergy—the experimenters—have been here longer than the rest of us. Even Harshaw, and he works for them.” She pronounces his name with distaste, and I wonder what he’s done to offend her.

  “You think they’ve got more of a handle on this than we do?” I ask, intrigued.

  “Damn right.” (Yes, she says “damn”: she’s obviously getting into the spirit of things, speaking in the archaic slang the real old-timers would have used.) “I think there’s more going on here than meets the eye. They’ve made a lot more progress toward stabilizing this society than you’d expect for just five megs of runtime.” Her eyes flicker sharply toward a corner of the room right above the door, and I follow the direction of her gaze. “In part it’s because they can see everything, hear everything, including this. In part.”

  “But surely that’s not all?”

  She smiles at me enigmatically. “Break’s over, kid. Time to go back to work.”

  I get home late, bone-tired from filing returned books and standing behind a counter for hours. I have a gnawing sense of apprehension as I walk in the door. The lights are on in the living room and I can hear the television. I head for the kitchen first to get something to eat, and that’s where I am when Sam finds me.

  “Where’ve you been?” he demands.

  “Work.” I attack a tin of vegetable soup and a loaf of bread
tiredly.

  “Oh.” Pause. “So what are you doing?”

  He’s put the butter in the refrigerator so it’s as hard as a rock. “Training to be the new city librarian. Three days a week at present, but it’s an eleven-hour day.”

  “Oh.”

  He bends over to put a dirty plate in the washing machine. I manage to stop him just in time—it’s full of clean stuff. “No, you need to unload it first, okay?”

  “Huh.” He looks irritated. “So the city needs a new librarian?”

  “Yes.” I don’t owe him any explanations, do I? Do I?

  “Do you know Janis?”

  “Janis—” He looks thoughtful. “No. I didn’t even know we had a library.”

  “She’s leaving in a couple of months, and they need someone to replace her.”

  He begins to remove plates from the bottom tray in the washing machine and stack them on the work-top. “She doesn’t like the job? If it’s so bad, why are you taking it?”

  “It’s not that.” I finally get the soup out of the can and into a saucepan on the red-glowing burner. “She’s leaving because she’s pregnant.” I turn round to watch him. He’s focusing on the dishwasher, pointedly ignoring me. Still sulking, I suspect.

  “Pregnant? Huh.” He sounds a little surprised. “Why would anyone want to have a baby in—”

  “We’re fertile, Sam.”

  I manage to catch the plates he was unloading just in time. I straighten up, about half a meter from his nose, and he’s too flustered to avoid my gaze.

  “We’re fertile?”

  “That’s what Janis says, and judging by her state, I think she’s probably got the evidence to prove it.” I scowl at him for a moment, then turn back to the soup pan. “Got a bowl for me?”

  “Ye-yes.” The poor guy sounds genuinely shaken. I don’t blame him—I’ve had a few hours to think about it, and I’m still getting used to the idea. “I’ll just find one—”

  “Think about it. We signed up to join the study knowing it would run for a hundred megs, yes? Funny thing about libraries: You can look things up in them. The gestation time for a human neonate in a host body is twenty-seven to twenty-eight megs. Meanwhile, we’re all fertile, and we’ve been told we can earn points toward our eventual termination bonuses by fucking. The historical conception rate for healthy orthos having sex while fertile is roughly thirty percent per menstrual cycle. What does that sound like to you?”

  “But I, I—I mean, you could have—” Sam holds a soup bowl in front of himself as if it’s some kind of shield, and he’s trying to keep me at bay.

  I glare at him. “Don’t say it.”

  “I—” He swallows. “Here, take it.”

  I take the bowl.

  “I think I know what you thought I was going to say and you’re right and I take it back even though I didn’t say it. All right?” He says it very fast, running the words together as if he’s nervous.

  “You didn’t say it.”

  I put the bowl down very carefully, because there really is no need to throw it at his head, and also because, once I calm down a fraction, I realize that in point of fact he’s right, and he didn’t say that if I’d fucked him the other night and become pregnant it would have been all my own fault. Smart Sam.

  “It takes two to hold a grudge match.” I lick my lips. “Sam, I’m very sorry about the other night.” What comes next is hard to force out. “I shouldn’t have taken advantage of you. I’ve been going through a bad patch, but that’s no excuse. I’m not—I’ve never been—particularly good at self-restraint, but it won’t happen again.” And if it does, you won’t get an apology like this, that’s for sure. “Much as I like you, you’re not big on poly and this, this shit—” My shoulders are shaking.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” he says, and takes a step forward. Before I know what’s happening he’s hugging me, and it really is good to feel his arms around me. “It’s my fault, too. I should have more self-control and I knew all along you were getting interested in me, and I shouldn’t have put myself in a position where you might have thought—”

  I sniff. “Shit!” I yell, and let go of him then spin round.

  The soup is boiling over and there’s a nasty smell from the burner. I kill the power and grab the handle to shift it somewhere safe, then hunt around for something to mop it up with. While I’m doing that Sam, like a zombie with a priority instruction, keeps methodically unloading the washing machine and transferring crockery to the cupboards. Eventually I get what’s left of my soup into a bowl and pile my slices of bread on a plate, wondering why I didn’t just use the microwave oven in the first place.

  “By the time I get to eat this, it’ll all be cold.”

  “My fault.” He looks apologetic. “If I’d let you get on with it—”

  “Uh-huh.” We’re apologizing to each other for breathing loudly, what’s wrong with us? “Listen, here’s a question for you. You know the contract you, uh, signed—do you remember if there was a maximum duration on participation?”

  “A maximum?” He looks startled. “It just said minimum one hundred megs. Why?”

  “Figures.” I pick up my plate and bowl and head toward the living room. “Human neonates hatched in the wild in primitive conditions took at least half a gigasec to reach maturity.”

  “Are you”—he’s following me—“saying what I think you’re saying?”

  I put my bowl and plate down on the end table beside the sofa and perch on the arm, because if I sit on the sofa, it’ll try to swallow me for good. “Why don’t you tell me what you think I’m saying?”

  “I don’t know.” Which means he doesn’t want to say. He sits down at the other end of the sofa and stares at me. “We’re being watched, aren’t we? All the time. Do you think it’s wise to talk about it?”

  I blow on my soup to speed evaporative cooling. “No, but there’s no point being paranoid, is there? There are going to be a hundred of us in here in time, at least. I suspect we outnumber the experimenters twenty to one. Are you telling me they’re going to monitor the real-time take on everything we say to each other, as we say it? A lot of the netlink score incidents are preprogrammed—just events we happen to trigger. Someone has an orgasm in proximity to their spouse, netlink triggers. A bunch of zombies see someone damaging property or removing clothing in public, their netlinks trigger. It doesn’t mean someone is sitting on the switch watching the monitors all the time. Does it?”

  (Actually it’s possible that this is the case, if we’re in a panopticon prison run by spooks rather than half-assed academics, but I’m not going to tell them that I know this, assuming they exist. No way. Especially as I don’t know why I know this.)

  “But if we’re being watched—”

  “Listen.” I put my spoon down. “We are here for a minimum of three years, maximum term unspecified, and we are fertile. That sounds to me like what they’ve got in mind involves breeding a population of genuine dark ages citizens. This is a separate polity, in case you’d forgotten, which means it has a defensible frontier—the assembler that generated these bodies we’re wearing. Assemblers don’t just make things, they filter things: They’re firewalls. Polities are de facto independent networks of tightly connected T-gates defined by the firewalls that shield their edges from whatever tries to come in through their longjump T-gates. Their borders, in other words. But you can have a polity without internal T-gates; what defines it is the frontier, not the interior. We’re functioning under YFH’s rules. Doesn’t that mean that anyone born into the place will be under the same rules, too?”

  “But what about freedom of movement?” Sam looks antsy. “Surely they can’t stop them if they want to emigrate?”

  “Not if they don’t know there’s an outside universe to emigrate to,” I say grimly. I take a spoonful of soup and wince, burning the roof of my mouth. “Ouch. We aren’t supposed to talk about our earlier lives. What if they tighten the score system a bit more, so that mentio
ning the outside in front of children, or in public, costs us points? Then how are the nubes going to figure it out?”

  “That’s crazy.” He jerks his head from side to side emphatically. “Why would anyone want to do that? I can understand the original purpose of the experiment, to research the social circumstances of the dark ages by experimental archaeology. But trying to create a whole population of orthos, stuck in this crazy dark ages sim and not even knowing it’s a historical re-enactment rather than the real universe . . . !”

  “I’m not sure yet,” I say tiredly. “I’m not at all sure what it’s about. But that’s the point. We’re missing essential data.”

  “Right, right.” He looks pained. “Do you suppose it’s anything to do with why they were picking people straight out of memory surgery?”

  “Yes, that’s got to be part of it.” I gaze at him across a cold continental rift of sofa. “But that’s only a part.” I was going to say we have to get out of here, but that’s not enough anymore. And despite what I’ve just said publicly, there’s stuff that I’m not going to talk about. Like, I don’t think we’ll ever be allowed out. I don’t know if this will ever end. If the child thing is true, they may be prepared to hold us here indefinitely, or worse. And that’s leaving aside the most important questions: Why? And why us?

  I go to work the next day, and the one after that, and by the end of my third day I am exhausted. I mean, shattered. Library work doesn’t sound as if it should be hard, but when you’re working for eleven hours with a one-hour break in the middle for lunch, it wears you down. The daytime is almost empty, but there’s a small rush of custom every evening around six o’clock, and I have to scurry to and fro hunting for tickets, filing returned books, collecting fines, and getting things sorted out. Then in the morning I end up pushing a trolley loaded with books around the shelves, returning the borrowed items and sorting out anything that’s been put back on a shelf out of sequence. If there’s any time left over, I end up dusting the shelves that are due for cleaning.