Glasshouse - Charles Stross [123]
She falls silent again. After a moment I realize she’s staring at me. “What is it?”
“We need to talk about your blackouts.”
“My what?” I bite my tongue, but it’s a bit late to play dumb.
Dr. Hanta raises one eyebrow and crosses her arms. “I’m not stupid, you know.” She looks away, as if she’s speaking to someone else. “Everyone in here has been through redactive reweighting and experiential reduction before we recruit them. One of the reasons this polity needs a medical supervisor is to be ready for identity crises. Most people have some inkling of who they used to be and why they wanted memory surgery. Occasionally, we get someone who doesn’t remember—there’s something they wanted to bury so deep that they wouldn’t even know what it was about. Something painful. But I don’t normally see . . . well! You’ve gone into fugue twice since you were admitted to this ward, did you know that? I checked with your husband during your last one, and he said you’ve been having them more frequently.”
She leans toward me, keeping her hands sandwiched in her armpits as if she’s hugging herself. “I don’t like to intrude where I’m not wanted, but by the sound of it, you need help very badly indeed. You seem to have had a bad reaction to the suppressants the clinic used on you, and while I can’t be sure without making a detailed examination, there is a risk that you could be heading for some kind of crisis. I don’t want to overstate things, but in the worst-case scenario you could lose . . . well, everything that makes you you. For example, if it’s an autoimmune reaction—according to your file you’ve got a heuristic upgrade to your complement system, and sometimes the Bayesian recognizers start firing off at the wrong targets—you could end up with anterograde amnesia, a complete inability to lay down any new mnemostructures. Or it might just be a sloppy earlier edit bleeding through and triggering random integration fugues, in which case things will ease off after a while, although you won’t enjoy the ride. But I can’t tell you what to expect, much less treat you, if you won’t even admit you’ve got a problem.”
“Oh.” It takes me a while to absorb this, but Hanta is remarkably patient with me and waits while I think about things. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear she actually liked me. “A problem,” I echo, uncertain how much I can let slip, before a cold chill runs its icy fingers up my spine, and I shudder uncontrollably.
“Speaking of problems . . .” Hanta raises her caduceus: “This will hurt, but only momentarily and a lot less than being eaten alive by a mechaplague.” She smiles faintly as she points it at my shoulder, and I wince as the asps strike at me. There’s a toothy little prickling as they begin pumping adjuvant patches into my circulation, upgrading my prosthetic immune system so that it can deal with the pestis. I try not to wince.
“The infection will take some time to die off, and there’s a risk that it’s adaptable enough to out-evolve the robophages, so I’m going to keep you here overnight—just for observation. Hopefully you’ll be well enough to go home tomorrow, and I’m going to write you up for a week off work while you recover. In the meantime, have a think about what I said concerning your memory problem, and we can talk about it in the morning when I check on your progress.”
The snake-heads let go of me and wrap themselves back around the staff as Hanta stands up. “Sleep well!”
NATURALLY, I don’t sleep well at all.
At first, I spend an indeterminate time shuddering with cold chills and occasionally forgetting to inhale until some primitive reflex kicks me into sucking in great rasping gasps of air. Sleep is out of the question when you’re afraid you’ll stop breathing, so I amuse myself to the point of abject terror by rolling the events of the day over in my mind. Great arterial gouts of blood project like ghosts upon the wall, shadows of my guilt over killing Fiore . . . Fiore? But