Glasshouse - Charles Stross [20]
Wrong.
I try to stand up too fast, and my knees both give way under me. I slump against the wall of the booth, feeling dizzy, and as I hit the wall I realize I’m too short. I’m still at the stage of feeling rather than thinking. The next thing I know I’m sitting down again and the booth is uncomfortably narrow because my hips are too wide and I’m too short in the trunk as well. There’s something else, too. My arms feel—odd, not wrong, just different. I lift a hand and put it in my lap, and my thighs feel too big, and then there’s something else. Oh, I realize, sliding my hand between my legs, I’m not male. No, I’m female. I raise my other hand, explore my chest. Female and orthohuman.
This in itself is no big deal. I’ve been a female orthohuman before; I’m not sure when or for how long, and it’s not my favorite body plan, but I can live with it for the time being. What makes me freak and stand up again, so suddenly I get black spots in my visual field and nearly fall over, is the corollary. Someone tampered with my backup! And then the double take: I am the backup. Somewhere a different version of me has died.
“Shit,” I say aloud, leaning against the frosted door of the cubicle. My voice sounds oddly unfamiliar, an octave higher and warmer. “And more shit.”
I can’t stay in here forever, but whatever I’m going to find out when I open the door can’t be good. Steeling myself against a growing sense of dread, I hit the door latch. It’s about then that I realize I’m not wearing anything. That’s no surprise—my manifold jacket was made from T-gates, and T-gates are one of the things that an A-gate can’t fabricate—but my leggings have gone, too, and they were ordinary fabric. I’ve been well and truly hacked, I realize with a growing sense of dread. The door slides open, admitting a gust of air that feels chilly against my damp skin. I blink and glance around. It looks like my apartment, but there’s a blank white tablet on the low desk beside the chair, the booby trap has gone, and the door is back in the wall. When I examine it I see that it’s the wrong color, and the chair isn’t the one I ran up on the apartment gate.
I look at the tablet. The top surface says, in flashing red letters, READ ME NOW.
“Later.” I glance at the door, shudder, then go into the bathroom. Whoever’s got me is clearly not in any hurry, so I might as well take my time and get my head together before I confront them.
The bathrooms in the rehab suites are interchangeable, white ceramic eggs with water and air jets and directionless lighting that can track you wherever you go and drainage ducts and foldaway appliances that live in the walls. I dial the shower up to hot and high and stand under it, shivering with fear, until my skin feels raw and clean.
I’ve been hacked, and there’s nothing I can do about it except jump through whatever hoops they’ve laid out for me and hope they kill me cleanly at the end or let me go. Resistance, as they say, is futile. If they’ve hacked my backup so deeply that they can force a new body plan on me, then they can do anything they want. Mess with my head, run multiple copies of me, access my private keys, even make a zombie body and use it to do whatever they want it to do while masquerading as me. If they can wake me up in the A-gate of another rehab apartment, then they’ve trapped my state vector. I could run away a thousand times, be tortured to death a hundredfold—and I’d still wake up back in that booth, a prisoner once more.
Identity theft is an ugly crime.
Before I leave the bathroom, I take a good look at my new body in the mirror. After all, I haven’t seen it before, and I’ve got a nasty feeling it’ll tell me something about the expectations of my captors.
It turns out that I’m orthohuman and female all right, but not obtrusively so. I think I’m probably fifteen centimeters shorter than I was, axisymmetrical, with good skin and