Glasshouse - Charles Stross [12]
“I could be.” She chews her lower lip and looks at me pensively. “You said you were hoping to see me.”
“Yes. I was wondering about the, uh, greeter thing. Who runs it, and whether they need any volunteers.”
She blinks and looks me up and down. “You think you’re sufficiently in control? You want to volunteer to—remarkable!” One of my external triggers twitches, telling me that she’s accessing my public metadata, the numinous cloud of medical notes that follow us all around like a swarm of phantom bees, ready to sting us into submission at the first sign of undirected aggression. “You’ve made really good progress!”
“I don’t want to be a patient forever.” I probably sound a bit defensive. Maybe she doesn’t realize she’s rubbed me up the wrong way, but I really don’t like being patronized.
“Do you know what you’re going to do when your control metrics are within citizenship bounds?” she asks.
“No idea.” I glance at the menu. “Hey, I’ll have one of whatever she’s drinking,” I tell the table.
“Why not?” She sounds innocently curious. Maybe that’s why I decide to tell her the unembellished truth.
“I don’t know much about who I am. I mean, whoever I was before, he put me in for a maximum wash, didn’t he? I don’t remember what my career was, what I used to do, even what I was interested in. Tabula rasa, that’s me.”
“Oh my.” My drink emerges from the table. She looks as if she doesn’t know whether to believe me or not. “Do you have a family? Any friends?”
“I’m not sure,” I admit. Which is a white lie. I have some very vague memories of growing up, some of them vivid in a stereotyped way that suggests crude enhancement during a previous memory wash—memories I’d wanted to preserve at all costs, two proud mothers watching my early steps across a black sandy beach . . . and I have a strong but baseless conviction that I’ve had long-term partners, at least a gigasecond of domesticity. And there are faint memories of coworkers, phantoms of former Cats. But try as I might, I can’t put a face to any of them, and that’s a cruel realization to confront. “I have some fragments, but I’ve got a feeling that before my memory surgery I was pretty solitary. An organization person, a node in a big machine. Can’t remember what kind of machine, though.” Fresh-spilled blood bubbling and fizzing in vacuum. Liar.
“That’s so sad,” she says.
“What about you?” I ask. “Before you were an ice ghoul . . . ?”
“Oh yes! I grew up in a troupe, I had lots of brothers and sisters and parents. We were primate fundamentalists, you know? It’s kind of embarrassing. But I still hear from some of the cousins now and then—we exchange insights once in a while.” She smiles wistfully. “When I was a ghoul, it was one of the few things that reminded me I had an alien side.”
“But did you, when you were a ghoul, did you have . . . ?”
Her face freezes over: “No, I didn’t.” I look away, embarrassed for her. Why did I imagine I was the only liar at the table?
“About that food idea,” I say, hastily changing the subject, “I’m still trying out some of the eateries around here. I mean, getting to know what’s good and figuring out who hangs out where. I was thinking about going for a meal and maybe seeing if a few acquaintances are around afterward, Linn and Vhora. Do you know them? They’re in rehab, too, only they’ve been out a bit longer than us. Linn’s doing craft therapy, ad hoc environmental patching, while Vhora’s learning to play the musette.”
“Did you have anywhere in particular in mind to go and eat?” She unfreezes fast once we’re off the sensitive subject.
“I was thinking a pavement cafe in the Green Maze that hangs off the back of the Reich Wing looked like a possibility. It’s run by a couple of human cooks who design historically inauthentic Indonesian tapas in public. It’s strictly recreational, a performance thing: They don’t actually expect you to eat their prototypes—not unless you want to.” I raise a finger. “If that doesn’t interest you, there’s a fusion shed, also