"I'll—" Fiore stops. Again, he takes a deep breath and throws his shoulders back. "You're going to be living in the dark ages, in a simulated Euromerican cultura like those that existed in the period 1950–2040," he snaps. "I'm trying to tell you that this is our best reconstruction of the environment from available sources. This is a sociological and psychological immersion experiment, which means we'll be watching how you interact with each other. You get points for staying in character, which means obeying the society's ground rules, and you lose points for breaking role." I sit up. "Your individual score affects the group, which means everyone. Your cohort—all ten of you, one of the twenty groups we're introducing to this section of the polity over the next five megs—will meet once a week, on Sundays, in a parish center called the Church of the Nazarene, where you can discuss whatever you've learned. To make the simulation work better, there are a lot of nonplayer characters, zombies run by the Gamesmaster, and for much of the time you'll be interacting with these rather than with other experimental subjects. Everything's laid out in a collection of hab segments linked by gates so they feel like a single geographical continuum, just like a traditional planetary surface."
He calms down a little. "Questions?"
"What are the society's ground rules?" asks a male with dark skin in a light suit from the back row. He sounds puzzled.
"You'll find out. They're largely imposed through environmental constraints. If you need to be told, we'll tell you via your netlink or one of the zombies." Fiore sounds even more smug.
"What are we meant to do here?" asks the redhead in the seat beside me. She sounds alert if a little vague. "I mean, apart from ‘obey the rules.' A hundred megs is a long time, isn't it?"
"Obey the rules." Fiore smiles tightly. "The society you're going to be living in was formal and highly ritualized, with much attention paid to individual relationships and status often determined by random genetic chance. The core element in this society is something called the nuclear family. It's a heteromorphic structure based on a male and a female living in close quarters, usually with one of them engaging in semi-ritualized labor to raise currency and the other preoccupied with social and domestic chores and child rearing. You're expected to fit in, although child rearing is obviously optional. We're interested in studying the stability of such relationships. You'll find your tablets contain copies of several books that survived the dark ages."
"Okay, so we form these, uh, nuclear families," calls a female from the back row. "What else do we need to know?"
Fiore shrugs. "Nothing now. Except"—a thought strikes him—"you'll be living with dark ages medical constraints. Remember that! An accident can kill you. Worse, it can leave you damaged: You won't have access to assemblers during the experiment. You really don't want to try modifying your bodies, either; the medical technology that exists is quite authentically primitive. Nor will you have access to your netlinks from now on." I try to probe mine, but there's nothing there. For a panicky moment I wonder if I've gone deaf, then I realize, He's telling the truth! There's no network here. "Your netlinks will communicate social scoring metrics to you, and nothing else. There is a primitive conversational internetwork between wired terminals here, but you aren't expected to use it.
"We've laid on a buffet outside this room. I suggest you get to know each other, then each pick a partner and go through that door"—he points to a door at the other side of the white wall—"which will gate you to your primary residence for in-processing. Remember to take your slates so you can read the quickstart guide to dark ages society." He looks around the room briefly. "If there are no more questions, I'll be going."
A hand or two goes up at the back, but before anyone can call out, he turns and dives through the door he came in. I look at Redhead.
"Huh, I guess that's us told," she says. "What now?"
I glance at Big Guy. "What do you think?"
He stands up. "I think we ought to do like he said and eat," he says slowly. "And talk. I'm Sam. What are you called?"
"I'm R-Reeve," I say, stumbling over the name the tablet said I should use. "And you," I add glancing at redhead, "are . . . ?"
"You can call me Alice." She stands up. "Come on. Let's see who else is here and get to know them."
OUTSIDE the lecture theatre there are two long tables heaped with plates of cold finger food, fruit and "cheese"—strong-smelling curds fermented from something I can't identify—and glasses of wine. Five of us are male and five of us are female, and we partition into two loose clumps at either table, at opposite sides of the room. Besides Alice the redhead there's Angel (dark skin and frizzy hair), Jen (roundish face, pale blond hair, even curvier than I am), and Cass (straight black hair, coffee-colored skin, serious eyes). We're all looking a little uncomfortable, moving in jerks and tics, twitchy in our new bodies and ugly clothes. The males are Sam (whom I met), Chris (the dark-skinned male from the back row), El, Fer, and Mick. I try to tell them apart by the color of their suits and neckcloths, but it's hard work, and the short hair gives them all a mechanical, almost insectile, similarity. It must have been a very conformist age, I think.
"So." Alice looks round at our little group and smiles, then picks a cube of yellowish ‘cheese' from her woodpulp plate and chews it thoughtfully. "What are we going to do?"
Angel produces her tablet from a little bag that she hangs over her arm. If I had one, I didn't notice it, and I kick myself mentally for not thinking of improvising something like that. "There's a reading list here," she says, carefully tapping through it. I watch over her shoulder as scrolls dissolve into facsimile pages from ancient manuscripts. "There's that odd word again. What's a ‘wife'?"
"I think I know that one," says Cass. "The, uh, family thing. Where there were only two participants, and they were morphologically locked, the female participant was called a ‘wife' and the male was called a ‘husband.' It implies sexual relations, if it's anything like ice ghoul society."
"We aren't supposed to talk about the outside," Jen says uncomfortably.
"But if we don't, we don't have any points of reference for what we're trying to understand and live in, do we?" I say, fighting the urge to stare at Cass. Is that you in there, Kay? It might just be a coincidence, her knowing something about ice ghouls—there was a huge fad for them about two gigasecs ago, when they were first discovered. Then again, the bad guys might have noticed Kay and sent a headhunter after me, armed with whatever they can extract from her skull for bait . . .
"I want to know where they got these books," I say. "Look, all they've got is publication dates and rough sales figures, so we'll know they were popular. But whether they're accurate indicators of the social system in force is another matter."
"Who cares?" Jen says abruptly. She picks up a glass and splashes straw-colored wine into it from a glass jug. "I'm going to pick me a ‘husband' and leave the other details for later." She grins and empties her glass down her throat.
"What diurn?" Cass's brow furrows as she grapples with the tablet's primitive interface. It's the nearest thing we've got to a manual, I realize. "Aha," she says. "We're on day five of the week , called ‘Thursday.' Weeks have seven days, and we are supposed to meet on day one, about two-fifty kilo—no, three days—from now."
"So?" Jen refills her glass.
Cass looks thoughtful. "So if we're supposed to mimic a family, we probably ought to start by pairing off and going to whatever dwelling they've assigned us. After a diurn or so of ploughing through these notes and getting to know each other, we'll be better able to work out what we're supposed to be doing. Also, I guess, we can see if the partnering arrangement is workable."