Glasshouse - Charles Stross [71]
As I remember the sensations in my fingers, the somatic memory of writing, I get a horrible sense of certainty, a deep conviction that I really did send myself a twenty-page letter from the past, stuff I desperately needed to see—of which only three pages were allowed to reach me.
Dear self:
Right now you’re wondering who you are. I assume you’re over the wild mood swings by now and can figure out what other people’s emotional states signify. If not, I suggest you stop reading immediately and leave this letter for later. There’s stuff in here that you will find disturbing. Access it too soon, and you’ll probably end up getting yourself killed.
Who are you? And who am I?
The answer to that question is that you are me and I am you, but you lack certain key memories—most importantly, everything that meant anything to me from about two and a half gigaseconds ago. That’s an awfully long time. Back before the Acceleration most humans didn’t live that long. So you’re probably asking yourself why I—your earlier self—might want to erase all those experiences. Were they really that bad?
No, they weren’t. In fact, if I hadn’t gone through deep memory surgery a couple of times before, I’d be terrified. There’s stuff in here, stuff in my head, that I don’t want to lose. Forgetting is a little like dying, and forgetting seventy Urth-years of memories in one go is a lot like dying.
Luckily forgetfulness, like death, is reversible these days. Go to the House of Rishael the Exceptional in Block 54-Honey-September in the Polity of the Jade Sunrise and, after presenting a tissue sample, ask to speak to Jordaan. Jordaan will explain how to recover my latest imprint from escrow and how to merge the imprint block back into your mind. It’s a difficult process, but it’s stuff that belongs to you and brought you deep happiness when you were me. In fact, it’s the stuff that makes me myself—and the lack of which defines who you are in relation to me.
Incidentally, one of the things you’ll find in the imprint is the memory of how to access a trust fund with a quarter million écus in it.
(Yes, I’m a manipulative worm: I want you to become me again, sooner or later. Don’t worry, you’re a manipulative worm, too—you must be, if you’re alive to read this letter.)
Now, the basics.
You are recovering from deep memory erasure surgery. You are probably thinking that once you recover you’ll go and spend the usual wanderjahr looking for a vocation, find somewhere to live, meet friends and lovers, and set up a life for yourself. Wrong. The reason you are recovering from memory erasure surgery is that the people you work for have noticed a disturbing pattern of events centered on the Clinic of the Blessed Singularity run by the order of surgeon-confessors at City Zone Darke in the Invisible Republic. People coming out of surgery are being offered places in a psychological/historical research project aimed at probing the social conditions of the first dark age by live role-play. Some of these people have very questionable histories: in some cases, questionable to the point of being fugitive war criminals.
Your mission (and no, you don’t have any choice—I already committed us to it) is to go inside the YFH-Polity, find out what’s going on, then come back out to tell us. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
There’s a catch. The research community has been established inside a former military prison, a glasshouse that was used as a reprogramming and rehabilitation center after the war. It was widely believed to be escape-proof at the time, and it’s certainly a very secure facility. Other agents have already gone in. One very experienced colleague of yours vanished completely, and is now over twenty megs past their criticality deadline. Another reappeared eleven megaseconds late, reported to the prearranged