Glasshouse - Charles Stross [24]
“We know why the dark age happened,” Fiore continues. “Our ancestors allowed their storage and processing architectures to proliferate uncontrollably, and they tended to throw away old technologies instead of virtualizing them. For reasons of commercial advantage, some of their largest entities deliberately created incompatible information formats and locked up huge quantities of useful material in them, so that when new architectures replaced old, the data became inaccessible.
“This particularly affected our records of personal and household activities during the latter half of the dark age. Early on, for example, we have a lot of film data captured by amateurs and home enthusiasts. They used a thing called a cine camera, which captured images on a photochemical medium. You could actually decode it with your eyeball. But a third of the way into the dark age, they switched to using magnetic storage tape, which degrades rapidly, then to digital storage, which was even worse because for no obvious reason they encrypted everything. The same sort of thing happened to their audio recordings, and to text. Ironically, we know a lot more about their culture around the beginning of the dark age, around old-style year 1950, than about the end of the dark age, around 2040.”
Fiore stops. Behind me a couple of quiet conversations have broken out. He seems mildly annoyed, probably because people aren’t hanging on his every word. Me, I’m fascinated—but I used to be an historian, too, albeit studying a very different area.
“Will you let me continue?” Fiore asks pointedly, glaring at a female in the row behind me.
“Only if you tell us what this has got to do with us,” she says cheekily.
“I’ll—” Fiore stops. Again, he takes a deep breath and throws his shoulders back. “You’re going to be living in the dark ages, in a simulated Euromerican cultura like those that existed in the period 1950–2040,” he snaps. “I’m trying to tell you that this is our best reconstruction of the environment from available sources. This is a sociological and psychological immersion experiment, which means we’ll be watching how you interact with each other. You get points for staying in character, which means obeying the society’s ground rules, and you lose points for breaking role.” I sit up. “Your individual score affects the group, which means everyone. Your cohort—all ten of you, one of the twenty groups we’re introducing to this section of the polity over the next five megs—will meet once a week, on Sundays, in a parish center called the Church of the Nazarene, where you can discuss whatever you’ve learned. To make the simulation work better, there are a lot of nonplayer characters, zombies run by the Gamesmaster, and for much of the time you’ll be interacting with these rather than with other experimental subjects. Everything’s laid out in a collection of hab segments linked by gates so they feel like a single geographical continuum, just like a traditional planetary surface.”
He calms down a little. “Questions?”
“What are the society’s ground rules?” asks a male with dark skin in a light suit from the back row. He sounds puzzled.
“You’ll find out. They’re largely imposed through environmental constraints. If you need to be told, we’ll tell you via your netlink or one of the zombies.” Fiore sounds even more smug.
“What are we meant to do here?” asks the redhead in the seat beside me. She sounds alert if a little vague. “I mean, apart from ‘obey the rules.’ A hundred megs is a long time, isn’t it?”
“Obey the rules.” Fiore smiles tightly. “The society you’re going to be living in was formal and highly ritualized, with much attention paid to individual relationships and status often determined by random genetic chance. The core element in this society is something called the nuclear family. It’s a heteromorphic structure based on a male and a female living in close quarters, usually with one of them engaging