Glasshouse - Charles Stross [8]
“You fought a duel today,” says Piccolo-47. “Please describe the events leading up to the incident in your own words.”
I sit down on the stone steps beneath the fountain, lean back until I can feel the cool splashing of water on the back of my neck, and try to tell myself that I’m talking to a household appliance. That helps. “Sure,” I say, and summarize the diurn’s events—at least, the public ones.
“Do you feel that Gwyn provoked you unduly?” asks the counselor.
“Hmm.” I think about it for a moment. “I think I may have provoked her,” I say slowly. “Not intentionally, but she caught me watching her, and I could probably have disengaged. If I’d wanted to.” The admission makes me feel slightly dirty—but only slightly. Gwyn is walking around right now with no memory of having been stabbed in the guts. She’s lost less than an hour of her lifeline. Whereas my leg is still giving me twinges of memory, and I risked—
“You said you have not taken a backup. Isn’t that a little foolhardy?”
“Yes, yes it is.” I make up my mind. “And I’m going to take one as soon as we finish this conversation.”
“Good.” I startle slightly and stare at Piccolo-47, disturbed. Therapists don’t normally express opinions, positive or negative, during a session; it’s just broken the illusion that it’s not there, and I feel my skin crawl slightly as I look at its smooth carapace. “Examination of your public state suggests that you are progressing well. I encourage you to continue exploring the rehabilitative sector and to make use of the patient support groups.”
“Um.” I stare. “I thought you weren’t meant to intervene . . . ?”
“Intervention is contraindicated in early stages of recovery of patients with severe dissociative psychopathology consequential to memory excision. However, in later stages, it may be used where appropriate to provide guidance for a patient who is showing significant progress.” Then Piccolo-47 pauses. “I would like to make a request. You are free to disregard it.”
“Oh?” I stare at its dorsal manipulator root. It’s something like an iridescent cauliflower, flexing and shimmering and breathing, and something like a naked lung, turned inside out and electroplated with titanium. It’s fascinatingly abhuman, a macroscopic nanomachine so complex it seems almost alive in its own right.
“You said that Patient Kay mentioned the Yourdon experiment to you. Historian Professor Yourdon is one of my coworkers, and Kay is perfectly correct. Your relatively deep therapy means that you would be an ideal participant for the project. I also believe that your long-term recovery may benefit from participation.”
“Hmm.” I can tell when I’m being stroked for a hard sell. “You’ll have to tell me more about it.”
“Certainly. One moment?” I can tell Piccolo-47 is going into quicktime and messaging someone else: its focus of attention wanders—I can see the sensor peripherals unfocusing—and the manipulator root stops shimmering. “I have taken the liberty of transmitting your public case profile to the coordination office, Robin. The experiment I allude to is a cross-disciplinary one being conducted by the departments of archaeology, history, psychology, and social engineering within the Scholastium. Professor Yourdon is its coordinator-general. If you volunteer to participate, a copy of your next backup—or your original, should you choose total immersion—will be instantiated as a separate entity within an experimental community, where it will live alongside roughly a hundred other volunteers for thirty to a hundred megaseconds.” Roughly one to three old-style years. “The community is designed as an experiment to probe certain psychological constraints associated with life prior to the censorship wars. An attempt to reconstruct a culture that we have lost track of, in other words.”
“An experimental