Glasshouse - Charles Stross [131]
It’s there in front of me, a yawning abyss of my own making, no longer avoidable since Dr. Hanta applied her fixative. I am stuck with the me that I have become, unable to restore that which is missing. “I’m not who I was a week ago,” I say tightly. “She fixed the memory leakage, for one thing. And I’ve acquired a restored sense of my own mortality from somewhere I don’t want to talk about, except it’s not anything that they did to me. I think.” But a cynical corner of my mind says, You said “I love you,” didn’t you? Last time you did that, your CY-hack was triggered. Someone’s tweaked your netlink, haven’t they?
The cold horror that steals over you when you wake up unsure whether you died in the night has just stroked its bony hand along my spine. Somewhere between the cooling puddle of blood in the library basement and Dr. Hanta’s sly consent, I seem to have lost something. Sam’s right, old-me wouldn’t be doing this. Old-me would be scared of different things, and rightly so—and I’m still scared of Fiore and Yourdon, and I still want out of their perverse managed society, but we’re on board a MASucker, and I know what that means.
“I still want you,” I tell him. Although a worm of doubt adds, “I’m just not sure I want you for the same reasons I wanted you last week.”
“They’ve gotten to you.”
I laugh shakily. “They got to me a long time ago. I just didn’t notice until now.” I clutch at him, but as much from terror as lust. “Why are you here, Kay? Why did you sign up for the experiment?”
“I followed you.”
“Bullshit!” I can see it now. “That’s not enough. And don’t tell me it was to get away from your time with the ice ghouls. Why did you go there? What were you running away from?”
Sam is silent and unresponsive for a while. “If I tell you, you’ll probably hate me.”
“So?” I see an opportunity. Shuffling up onto the bed I pull my legs up under my dress and sit cross-legged with my hands in my lap. “If I listen to your story and I don’t hate you afterward, will you let me fuck you?”
“I don’t see what that’s got to do with—”
“Let me be the judge of my motives, Sam.” Even if they’re contaminated. “You keep trying to second-guess me. It’s getting to be a bad habit. Before, I didn’t want to sleep with you for reasons that made sense at the time. Then when the reasons no longer apply, you say I’m acting out of character. You don’t give me credit for being able to change of my own volition.”
He shakes his head.
“Have you any idea how insulting that is?”
“That’s not what I meant—”
“I am capable of change, that’s why I’m here!” I draw a deep breath. “I’m not who I was during the war, Sam, or before it, or even after it. I’m who I am now, which is the end product of all those other people becoming one another. They can put you into the dark ages, but they can’t put the dark ages into you, not short of truncating your life expectancy to about three gigasecs or erasing so many memories you might as well be . . .” I trail off. I’ve got a strange feeling that I just realized something vitally important, but I’m not sure what.
He looks at me oddly. “You’ll hate me,” he says. “I did terrible things.”
“So?” I shrug. “I did bad things, too. People out there wanted to kill me, Sam. I thought it was something to do with a mission I was on and had accidentally erased, but now I’m not so sure; maybe they were just after me because of, well, one of the people I used to be. A person who fought in the war. A combatant.”
He rocks back and forth thoughtfully. “Nobody here but us war criminals,” he says.
It is very interesting to discover that the phrase “my blood runs cold” actually reflects a physical sensation. It is much less pleasant to do so while sitting next to someone you love unconditionally and currently can’t share a room with without needing a change of underwear, and who’s just triggered that sensation in your head. And it’s even worse when you realize that what he said applies to you, too. “Nobody here but us monsters,” I say, trying to be flippant. “Or amnesiacs haunted by the ghosts of their past lives.