Glasshouse - Charles Stross [54]
So I’m in the kitchen all on my own, rummaging through the frozen packages in the freezer cupboard for something we both eat, and I manage to drop a pizza box on the floor. It splits open and the contents spill everywhere. It’s one of those moments when the whole universe comes spinning down on the top of your head, and you realize how alone and isolated you are, and all your problems seem to laugh at you. Who do I think I’m kidding? I ask myself, and I burst into tears on the spot.
I’m trapped in a wholly inadequate body, with only patchy memories of whoever I used to be left to prod me along in search of a better life. I’m trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs. Here I am, thinking I remember being in rehab, reading a letter written to myself by an earlier version—and how do I know I wrote the letter to myself? I don’t even remember doing it! For all I know it’s a confabulation, my own bored attempt to inject some excitement into a life totally sapped of interest. Certainly the rant about people who are out to kill me seems increasingly implausible and distant—outright unbelievable, if not for the man with the wire.
I can’t remember any reasons why anyone would want me dead. And even a half-competent trainee assassin would find killing me a trivial challenge at best, right now. I can’t even put a frozen pizza in a microwave oven without dropping it on the floor. I’m spending my spare hours in the garage trying to weld together a crossbow and busily planning to make myself a sword when the bad guys, if they’re real, are running a panopticon—a total surveillance society—and have weapons like the one on the Church altar, edged with the laser-speckling strangeness of supercondensates, waveguides for wormhole generators. Knives that can cut space-time. They’ll come for me in the clear light of day, and they’ll be backed by the whole police state panoply of memory editors and existential programmers. There’s nowhere for me to run, no way out except through the T-gates controlled by the experimenters, and no way in bar the same, and I don’t even know if I’ve lost Kay, or if Kay is Cass or someone else entirely, and I’m not sure why I let Piccolo-47 talk me into coming here. All I’ve got are my memories, and I can’t even trust them.
I feel helpless and lost and very, very small, and I stare at the pizza through a blurring veil of tears, and right then I hear the front door lock click to itself and footsteps in the front hall, and it’s more than I can bear.
Sam finds me in the kitchen, sobbing as I fumble around for the dustpan.
“What’s wrong?” He stands in the doorway looking at me, a bewildered expression on his face.
“I’m, I—” I manage to get the box into the trash, then drop the brush on top of it. “Nothing.”
“It can’t be nothing,” he insists, logically enough.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I sniff and wipe my eyes on the back of my sleeve, embarrassed and hating myself for this display of weakness. “It’s not important—”
“Come on.” His arm is around my shoulders, comforting. “Come on, out of here.”
“Okay.”
He leads me out of the kitchen and into the living room and over to the big glass windows. I watch, not really comprehending, as he opens one of them. Floor to ceiling, it forms a door in its own right, a door into the back garden. “Come on,” he says, walking out onto the lawn.
I follow him outside. The grass is getting long. What do you want? I wonder.
“Sit down,” he says. I blink and look at the bench.
“Oh, okay.” I sniff again.
“Wait here,” he says. He vanishes back into the house, leaving me alone with my stupid and stupefying sense of inadequacy. I stare at the grass. It’s moist