Glasshouse - Charles Stross [70]
I see relatively little of Sam during this time. After our argument, indeed ever since the halfhearted reconciliation, he’s withdrawn from me. Maybe it’s the shock of learning about his reproductive competence, but he’s very distant. Before that nightmare, before I messed up everything between us, I’d hug him when he got home from work. We’d have a laugh together, or chat, and we were (I’m sure of this) growing close. But since that night and our argument, we haven’t even touched. I feel isolated and a bit afraid. If we did touch I’d—I don’t know. Let’s be honest about this: I have an active sex drive, but the thought of getting pregnant in here scares the shit out of me. And while there are other things we could do if we were inclined to intimacy, I find the whole situation is a very effective turnoff. So I can’t really blame Sam for avoiding me as much as he can. The sooner he gets out of here the sooner he can rush off in search of his romantic love—assuming the bitch didn’t give up on him and go in search of a poly nucleus to joyfully exchange bodily fluids with about five seconds after he joined the experiment. Sam broods, and, knowing his luck, he’s fixated on someone I wouldn’t give the time of day to.
That’s life for you.
FOUR weeks into my new job, twelve weeks before Janis is due to go on maternity leave, I have another wake-up-screaming nightmare.
This time things are different. For one thing, Sam isn’t there to hold me when I wake up. And for another, I know with cold certainty that this one is true. It’s not simply a hideous dream, it’s something that actually happened to me. Something that wasn’t meant to be erased back at the clinic.
I’m sitting at a desk in a cramped rectangular room with no doors or windows. The walls are the color of old gold, dulled but iridescent, rainbows of diffraction coming off them whenever I look away from the desk. I’m in an orthohuman male body, not the mecha battlecorpse of my previous nightmare, and I’m wearing a simple tunic in a livery that I vaguely recognize as belonging to the clinic of the surgeon-confessors.
On the desk in front of me sits a stack of rough paper sheets, handwoven with ragged edges. I made the stuff myself a long time ago, and any embedded snitches in it have long since died of old age. In my left hand I hold a simple ink pen with a handle made of bone that I carved from the femur of my last body—a little personal conceit. There’s a bottle of ink at the opposite side of the desk, and I recall that procuring this ink cost a surprising amount of time and money. The ink has no history. The carbon soot particles suspended in it are isotopically randomized. You can’t even tell what region of the galaxy it came from. Anonymous ink for a poison pen. How suitable . . .
I’m writing a letter to someone who doesn’t exist yet. That person is going to be alone, confused, probably very frightened indeed. I feel a terrible sympathy for him in his loneliness and fear, because I’ve been there myself, and I know what he’s going through. And I’ll be right there with him, living through every second of it. (Something’s wrong. The letter I remember reading back in rehab was only three pages, but this stack is