Glasshouse - Charles Stross [47]
“Not often, I don’t think,” I say, vaguely disturbed by a recollection of military officers briefing me: trouble in another life, urgent plotting against an evil contingency.
“Not unless they’re trying to hide something from themselves.”
I manage to fake up an amused laugh for him. “I don’t think that’s very likely. Do you?”
“I’d . . . well. I’m pretty narrowly channeled emotionally. Narrow, but deep. I had a family. And it all went wrong, for reasons I can’t deal with now, reasons I could have done something about, maybe. Or maybe not. Whatever, that’s the bare outline of what I remember. The rest is all third-person sketching, reconstructed memory implants to replace whatever it meant to me. Because, I’m not exaggerating, it burned me out. If I hadn’t undergone memory redaction, I’d probably have become suicidal. I have a tendency toward reactive depression, and I’d just lost everything that meant anything to me.”
I hold his hand, not daring to move, suddenly wondering what kind of emotional time bomb I casually selected over the cheese and wine table half a week ago.
After about a minute, he sighs again. “It’s over. They’re in the past, and I don’t remember it too clearly. I didn’t have the full surgery, just enough to add a layer of fuzz so that I could build a new life for myself.” He looks at me. “Do you know?”
Know what? I think, feeling panicky. Then I understand what he’s asking.
“I had memory surgery, too,” I say slowly, “but it wasn’t for the first time. And it was thorough. I’ve—” I swallow. “I had to read an autobiography I wrote for myself.” And did I lie when I was writing it? Did that other me tell the truth, or was he spinning a pretty tapestry of lies for the stranger he was due to become in the future? “It said I was mated once, long-term. Three partners, six children, it lasted over a gigasec.” I feel shaky as I consider the next part. “I don’t remember their faces. Any of them.”
In truth I don’t remember any of it. It might as well have happened to someone else. According to my autobiography it did. The whole thing ended more than four gigasecs ago—over a hundred and twenty years—and I went through my first memory reset early in the aftermath, and a much more thorough one recently. For more than thirty years those three mates and six children meant more to me than, well, anything. But all they are today is background color to the narrative of my life, like dry briefing documents setting up a prefabricated history for a sleeper agent about to be injected into a foreign polity.
Sam holds my hand. “I had surgery to deal with the pain,” he says. “And I came out of surgery, and I found I probably didn’t need it in the first place. Pain is a stimulus, a signal that the organism needs to take some kind of evasive action, isn’t it? I don’t mean the chronic pain caused by nerve damage, but ordinary pain. And emotional pain. You need to do something about it, not avoid it. Afterward, it was distant, but I felt empty. Only half-human. And I wasn’t sure who I was, either.”
I stroke his hand. “Was it the dissociative psychopathology?” I ask. “Or something deeper?”
“Deeper.” He sounds absent. “I had such a void that I—well, I made the mistake of falling in love again. Too soon, with somebody who was brilliant and fast and witty and probably completely crazy. And they asked me about the experiment while I was miserable, trying to figure out whether I really was in love or was just fooling myself. We discussed the experiment, but I don’t think they were too keen on the idea. And in the end it all got too much for me: I signed up, backed myself up, and woke up in here.” He looks at me unhappily. “I made a mistake.”
“What?” I stare at him, not sure what to make of this.
“It’s not