Glasshouse - Charles Stross [132]
“Has it occurred to you that YFH-Polity might be very convenient for a certain type of person?” Sam asks slowly.
I’m getting impatient. “Are you going to lay me down on this bed and have sex with me after you finish lecturing me to death?”
He turns a funny color. “If we both still want to.”
If we both still want to. Well, I guess you just have to work with what you’ve got. “I’m all ears,” I say.
He shudders. “Don’t say that.”
“Well it’s”—not literally—“true. Sort of.”
“Where were you when the war broke out?” he asks.
Oops. I didn’t expect him to ask that. Revealing that kind of thing would be a big no-no under normal circumstances—a breach of operational security that could allow an opponent to work out exactly who you are and thereby figure out all sorts of useful things about you, enough to endanger you operationally, because virtually everything you ever did in public is stored in a database somewhere. But—we’re in the guts of a MASucker, and if I’m not mistaken, there’s only one data channel in or out, and Sam isn’t part of the cabal, and I reckon the current risk of our being eavesdropped on is low. Nor are these normal circumstances.
“I was aboard a MASucker, interviewing the crew,” I admit. “We were cut off for more than a gig after the net went down.” Sam makes a thoughtful noise. “Your turn,” I prompt, trying to change the subject.
“I was an auditor.” Sam is silent again. “That’s why they drafted me.”
“They?”
“The Solipsist Nation: Third Unforgivable Thoughtcrime Battalion, to be precise. They were doing a search and sweep for unsecured memory temples through the disconnected segment I was stranded in, less than a hundred kilosecs after Curious Yellow cut loose. I’d already been censored and compromised, and they just grabbed me and added me to their distributed denial of consciousness array. I spent the next couple of megs scrambling graveyards beyond retrieval, then they got around to actually in-processing me and assigned me to erasing archive trails.”
Ugh. And I thought what I did in the Linebarger Cats was ugly? I must shiver or give some other cue because Sam pulls away from me slightly. “What clades did the Solipsist Nation align with?” I ask, trying to distract him.
“What clades?” He shakes his head. “It was us against everyone, Reeve. You think anybody in their right minds would ally themselves with an aggressively solipsistic borganism?”
“But you”—I force myself to lean closer as I ask; he’s tense and unhappy—“you were just a component, weren’t you?”
He shakes his head. “I had some degree of autonomy, by the time the war ended the Nation had taken to investing us with a modicum of free will. I was . . . well. Before the war, I looked pretty much the way you do right now. The Nation upgraded me, turned me into a combat ogre—and put me on occupation duty. You know what they called us? Rape machines. If you want to break someone’s will to resist, you can go via the brain, but if the netlink’s been fried by EMP, you have to get physical. They gave us penises with backward-facing spines, you know that? We did . . . terrible things. Eventually we were overrun—my segment was overrun—by a consortium of enemies, and they offlined us and when I woke up I was back to being me again, but a me with memories and a large chunk of the Nation wedged in my head. I spent half a meg in my cell disbelieving in the walls and floor before I realized that they had to exist for the same reason I had to exist. And while I was part of the Nation I did things.” Deep breath. “Things that left me ashamed to be human. Or male.”
“Yeah, but.” I stall. “You weren’t yourself. Right?”
“I wish I could believe that.” He sounds forlorn. “I wouldn’t do that kind of thing now, but then—I remember believing in what I was doing. That was part of why I did the ice ghoul thing, I didn’t want to be part of a species that could dream something like the Solipsist Nation into existence. I wanted—we wanted—to think every thought in the human phase-space. Do you know what it’s like to be hungry and always eating and never full? Solipsist