Glasshouse - Charles Stross [126]
I nuzzle into the base of his neck. “That would be bad.” It’s my turn to shudder with a frisson of existential dread at the thought that I could have lost him. Somewhere in the past week Sam has turned into my anchor, my refuge in the turbulent waters of identity. “I’ve got . . . well. Things are a bit jumbled today. What happened? When did you hear . . . ?”
“I came as soon as I could,” he mumbles in my ear. “Last night they called but said I couldn’t visit, it was too late.” He tenses.
“And?” I prompt. I feel as if there should be something more.
“You were fitting.” He’s still tense. “Dr. Hanta said it’s an acute crisis; you needed a fixative, but she couldn’t do it without your permission. I told her to give it anyway, but she refused.”
“A fixative? What for?”
“Your memories.” He’s even tenser. I let go of him, feeling cold.
“What does this fixative do?”
Dr. Hanta answers from behind me as I turn round to look at her. “Memory is encoded in a number of ways, as differential weightings in synaptic connections and also as connections between different nerves. The last excision and redaction you underwent was faulty. You began to experience breakthrough. In turn, that was triggering alerts in your enhanced immune system, and then you got yourself exposed to a mechanocytic infestation, which made things much worse. Whenever new associative traces would start integrating, your endogenous robophages would decide it was a mechanocyte signal and kill the nerve cells. You were well on your way to losing the ability to form new long-term associative traces—progressive brain damage. The fixative is normally used as the last step in redactive editing. I used it to renormalize, erase, the old memories that were breaking through. I’m sorry, but you won’t be able to access them now—you keep those that you’ve already integrated, but the others are gone for good.”
Sam has loosened his grip on me, and I lean against him as I stare at the doctor. “Did I give you permission to mess with my mind?” I ask.
Hanta just looks at me.
“Did I?” I echo myself. I feel aghast. If she did it against my will, that’s—
“Yes,” says Sam.
“What?”
“She—you were pretty far gone.” He hunches over again. “She was describing the situation to you, and me, and I was asking her to do it, and she said she couldn’t—then you were delirious. You began mumbling and she asked you, and you said yes.”
“But I don’t remember . . .” I stop. I think I do remember, sort of. But I can’t be sure, can I? “Oh.”
I stare at Hanta. I recognize the expression in her eyes. I stare at her for a long time—then I manage to make myself nod, just a quick jerk really, but it’s enough to break contact, and I think we all breathe out simultaneously. Meanwhile I’m thinking, Shit, I’ll never be able to figure out where I’ve come from now, will I? But it’s not as bad as what was going to happen otherwise. I don’t remember the attacks, exactly, but I remember what happened between them, the consequences—it’s a consistent story. A new story of my life, I suppose. “I feel much better,” I say cautiously.
Sam laughs, and there’s a raw edge in it that borders on hysteria. “You feel better?” He hugs me again, and I hug him right back. Hanta is smiling, with what I think is relief at a difficult situation resolved. The suspicious paranoid corner of me files it away for future reference, but even my secret-agent self is willing to concede that Hanta might actually be what she seems, an ethically orthodox practitioner with only the best interests of her patients at heart. Which is a big improvement on Fiore or the Bishop, but at least one out of three isn’t bad.
“So when can I go home?” I ask expectantly.
IT turns out that I’m stuck in hospital for the rest of the day and the next night, too. Hospital life is tedious, punctuated by the white-clad ghosts wheeling around trolleys