Glasshouse - Charles Stross [124]
The lights on the ward have dimmed, and the glimpse of sky I can see through the windows is deepening toward purple, fly-specked with burning pinpricks of luminescence that glitter oddly, as if refracted through a deep pool of water. Maybe they don’t know I know about Curious Yellow and the assembler in the library basement, I tell myself. They just think I’m having a mental breakdown, and I went for a little climb. Dissociative fugue, isn’t that what the ancients called it? I got myself infected with compost nano and Fiore called Hanta in to patch me up, and he won’t mention it in Church because it would undermine the integrity of the experiment. Maybe they’re right, and I just imagined killing Fiore. I’m not simply remembering fragments of badly suppressed memories, I’m confabulating out of fragments, synthesizing false memories from the wreckage of a failed erasure job. The memories of my time in the Cats, could they simply be recollections from a game I used to play? Multiplayer immersive worlds with a plot and an identity model—I don’t remember being a gamer, but if I wanted to get rid of an addiction, mightn’t I have tried to flush it out with a lightweight round of memory surgery?
I can’t ask anyone, I realize. If I ask Sam, and he hasn’t heard of the Linebarger Cats, it doesn’t mean they weren’t real—everyone here’s been through memory excision! I’d giggle if my throat wasn’t so dry. I am Reeve! Watch me fake up a bunch of memories to haunt myself with! Was the guy who stalked me through the hallways of the Invisible Republic real? What about the mad bitch with the sword who called me out? I’ve been running from enemies I never actually saw—only glimpsed out of the sides of my eyes. It’s like I’m suffering from blindsight, the strange neurological trauma that leaves its victims unable to see but able to sense events in their visual field by guessing. Maybe I’m an intelligence agent trying to track down a dangerous nest of enemies . . . and maybe I’m just a sad, sick woman who used to substitute game play for living a real life and who’s now paying the price.
I lie awake in the twilight and eventually I realize that the shivering has gone. I ache, and I’m feeble, but that’s to be expected after the long climb. And as I lie there I become aware of the subtle noises on the ward, the soft white noise of the air-conditioning, the tick of a clock, the quiet sobbing of—
Sobbing?
I sit bolt upright, the sheet and blanket falling away from me. My thoughts churn in parallel with a sense of dread and a numinous awareness of relief. Rescuing Cass and If Cass is here, then that memory was real with Still doesn’t mean everything else was real and finally If it was real, Cass must be . . .
“Shit,” I hear myself mutter. I pull the bedding up and clutch it like a frightened child. “I can’t deal with this.” I feel like sucking my thumb. “I am not ready for this.” I’m subvocalizing, so low I make no sound. I have to talk softly when I’m telling myself the truth, because the truth is embarrassing and hurtful. I flash back to what Hanta said: When she’s better, I’ll ask her who she wants to be, and that’s a comfort because I certainly don’t have anything better to offer her. Is Hanta up to doing memory surgery properly? I ponder. It would surprise me if they didn’t have a full surgeon-confessor along for the ride—it’s the ultimate prophylactic for those little ethical embarrassments that an experimental polity might suffer. (Or for those little infiltration-level embarrassments that a secret military installation might encounter, a lying, cynical part of me that I’m no longer entirely sure I believe in adds.)
I lie down again.