Glasshouse - Charles Stross [29]
I prowl around the upstairs corridor, opening doors and trying to puzzle out the purpose of the rooms to either side. They separate rooms by function, but most of them seem to have multiple uses. One of them might be a bathroom, but it’s too large and appears to be jammed—all the hygiene modules are extended and frozen simultaneously, as if it’s crashed. A couple of the rooms have sleeping platforms in them, and other stuff, big wooden cabinets. I look in one, but there’s nothing but a pole extending from one side to the other with some kind of hooked carrier slung over it.
It’s all very puzzling. I sit down on the bed and pull out my tablet just as it dings for attention. What now? I ask myself.
The tablet’s sprouted a button and an arrow and it says, POINT AT OBJECT TO IDENTIFY.
Okay, so this must be the help system, I think. Relieved, I point it at the boxy cabinet and press the button.
WARDROBE. Storage cabinet for clothes awaiting use. Note: used clothing can be cleaned in the UTILITY ROOM in the basement by means of the WASHING MACHINE. As new arrivals, you have only one set of clothes. Suggested task for tomorrow—go downtown and buy new clothes.
My feet itch. I kick my shoes off impulsively, glad to be rid of those annoying heels. Then I shrug out of the black pocketless jacket and stash it in the wardrobe, using the hook-and-arm affair dangling from the bar. It looks lonely there, and I suddenly feel very odd. Everything here is overwhelmingly strange. How’s Sam taking it? I wonder, feeling concerned; he wasn’t doing so well in the reception session, and if this is as weird for him as it is for me . . .
I wait for my head to stop spinning before I go back downstairs. (A thought strikes me on the way. Am I supposed to wear the same outfit inside my ‘house’ as I do in public? These people have a marked public/private split personality—they probably have different costumes for formal and informal events.) In the end, I leave the jacket but, a trifle regretfully, put the shoes back on.
I find Sam slumped in one corner of a huge sofa in the living room, facing a chunky black box with a curved lens that shows colorful but flat images. It’s making a lot of indistinct noise. “What is that?” I ask him, and he almost jumps out of his skin.
“It’s called a television,” he says. “I am watching football.”
“Uh-huh.” I walk round the sofa and sit down halfway along it, close enough to reach out and take his hand, but far enough away to maintain separation if both of us want to. I peer at the pictures. Some kind of mecha—no, they’re ortho males, right? In armor—are forming groups facing each other. They’re color coded. “Why are you watching this?” I ask. One of them throws something alarmingly like an assault mine at the other group of orthos, who try to jump on it. Then they begin running and squabbling for ownership of the mine. After a moment someone blows a whistle and there’s a roaring noise that I realize is coming from the crowd watching the—ritual? Competitive-self-execution? Game?—from rows of seats behind them.
“It’s supposed to be a popular entertainment.” Sam shakes his head. “I thought if I watched it I might understand more—”
“What’s the most important thing we can understand?” I ask, leaning toward him. “The experiment, or how to live in it?”
He sighs and picks up a black knobby rectangle, points it at the box, and waits for the picture to fade to black. “The tablet said I ought to try it,” he admits.
“My tablet said we have to go and buy clothing tomorrow. We’ve only got what we’re wearing, and apparently it gets dirty and smelly really fast. We can’t just throw it away and make more, we have to buy it downtown.” A thought strikes me.