Glasshouse - Charles Stross [23]
“I think so,” he says slowly, and shrugs, then looks uncomfortable. Not surprising, as his outfit looks as if it’s strangling him slowly. “Did you just come through? I found a READ ME in my room after my last backup—”
“Yeah, me, too,” I say. I clutch the tablet under my arm and smile up at him. I can recognize nervous chatter when I hear it and Big Guy looks every bit as uneasy as I feel. “Do you remember signing, or did you do that after your backup, too?”
“I’m not the only one?” He looks relieved. “I was in rehab,” he says hastily. “Coming out of the crazy patch you go through. Then I woke up here—”
“Yeah, whatever.” I nod, losing interest. “Me too. When is it starting?”
A door I hadn’t noticed before opens in the white wall at the back and a plump male ortho walks in. This one is wearing a long white coat held shut with archaic button fasteners up the front, and he waddles as he walks, like a fat, self-satisfied amphibian. His hair is black and falls in lank, greasy-looking locks on either side of his face, longer than that of any of the other males here. He walks to the podium and makes a disgusting throat-clearing noise to get our attention.
“Welcome! I’m glad you agreed to come to our little introductory talk today. I’d like to apologize for requiring you to come in person, but because we’re conducting this research project under rigorous conditions of consistency, we felt we should stay within the functional parameters of the society we are simulating. They’d do it this way, with a face-to-face meeting, so . . . if you would all like to take seats?”
We take a while to sort ourselves out. I end up in the front row, sitting between Big Guy and a female with freckled pale skin and coppery red hair, not unlike Linn, but wearing a cream blouse and a dark gray jacket and skirt. It’s not a style I can make any sense of—it’s vertically unbalanced and, frankly, a bit weird. But it’s not that different from what they’ve given me to wear, so I suppose it must be historically accurate. Have our aesthetics changed that much? I wonder.
The person on the podium gets started. “I am Major-Doctor Fiore, and I worked with Colonel-Professor Yourdon on the design of the experimental protocol. I’m here to start by explaining to you what we’re trying to achieve, albeit—I hope you’ll understand—leaving out anything that might prejudice your behavior within the trial polity.” He smiles as if he’s just cracked a private joke.
“The first dark ages.” He throws out his chest and takes a deep breath when he’s about to say something he thinks is significant. “The first dark ages lasted about three gigaseconds, compared to the seven gigaseconds of the censorship wars. But to put things in perspective, the first dark ages neatly spanned the first half of the Acceleration, the so-called late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries in the chronology of the time. If we follow the historical record forward from the pretechnological era into the first dark age, we find we’re watching humans who lived like technologically assisted monkeys—very smart primates with complex mechanical tools, but basically unchanged since the species first emerged. Then when we look at the people who emerged from the first dark age, we find ourselves watching people not unlike ourselves, as we live in the modern era, the ‘age of emotional machines’ as one dark age shaman named it. There’s a gap in the historical record, which jumps straight from carbon ink on macerated wood pulp to memory diamond accessible via early but recognizable versions of the intentionality protocols. Somewhere in that gap is buried the origin of the posthuman state.”
Big Guy mutters something under his breath. It takes me a moment to decode it: What a pompous oaf. I stifle a titter of amusement