Glasshouse - Charles Stross [120]
“Put you in—what? What is it, Reeve? Reeve, are you having another fugue?”
Things are going gray around me. He leans close, and I whisper, “* * *,” in his ear. Then—
DESPERATION is the engine of necessity.
It’s two hundred megs since that committee meeting with Al and Sanni and a lot of things have changed. Me, for example: I’m not in military phenotype anymore. Neither is Sanni. We’re civilians now, corpuscles of military experience discharged into the circulating confusion of reconstruction that has become the future of Is.
I’m not used to being human again, ortho or otherwise—bits of me are missing. When the war exploded, trapping me on the MASucker for almost a generation, I was reduced to what I was carrying on my person and in my head. Then when I militarized myself, I had to let component aspects of my identity go. I’m not sure why, in all cases. Some things make sense (when at war, one’s scruples about inflicting pain and injury on the enemy faction must be suppressed), but there are gaps that follow no obvious rhyme or reason. According to my written notes from the period on the Grateful for Duration, I used to have an abiding and deep interest in baroque music of the preindustrialized age, but now I can’t recall even a scrap of melody. Again, I used to be married, with children, but I am mystified by my lack of memories from the period, or feelings. Maybe that was a reaction to grief, and maybe not—but now I’ve been demobilized, I find myself out of reaction mass and adrift along an escape vector diverging from all attachments. Only my new job retains any hold over me.
The Linebarger Cats emerged from the coalition with significant assets. To my surprise I received a credit balance that with careful management might mean I never need to work again—at least for a few gigasecs. It seems that warfare pays, if you’re on the winning side and manage not to misplace your mind in the process.
When I left MilSpace (a convoluted process involving numerous anonymous remixer networks and one-way censorship gates to strip me of my military modules before my reintegration into civil society), I had myself reassembled as a louche young man in the Cognitive Republic of Lichtenstein. There’s a lot to be said for being louche, especially after you’ve spent several hundred megaseconds with no genitals.
Lichtenstein is a vivid and cynical colony of artistic satirists, so sophisticated they’ve almost circled back into primitivism. By convention we use visual field filters that limn everything in dark strokes, filling our bodies with color. Life aspires toward a state of machinima. It’s a strange way to be, but familiar and comfortable after the unsleeping hyperspectral awareness of a tankie. So I hang around in the galleries and salons of Lichtenstein, exchanging witty repartee and tall stories with the other habitués, and in my copious free time I pay frequent trips to the bathhouses and floataria. I make a point of never sleeping with the same person twice in the same body, although I discover that even such anonymous abandon doesn’t protect me from my lovers’ tears: It seems half the population have lost someone and are wandering, searching the world over.
My life is outwardly directionless for the first four or five megs. In private I work on something that might eventually turn out to be a memoir of the war—an old-fashioned serialized text provocatively promoting a single viewpoint, without any pretense at objectivity—while in public I live on my savings. DeMob gave me a reasonably secure cover identity as a playboy remittance man from a primogeniture polity, sent to while away his youth in less hidebound (and politically loaded) biomes, and it’s not hard to keep up appearances. But deep down, the insignificance and lack of meaning of such a life chafes; I want to be doing something, and while the project I’ve been