Or I can try to find out what's really going on. Fiore and his shadowy boss, Bishop Yourdon, are doing something with this polity, that much is clear. This isn't just a straightforward experimental archaeology commune. Too many aspects of the setup turn out to be just plain wrong when you examine them closely. If I can figure out what they're trying to do, maybe I can discover a way out.
Which is why I spend a personal infinity laboriously stripping reel after reel of copper wire of its insulation and threading it onto the loom. The first step in figuring out what's going on is to get myself some privacy. I need a shoulder bag lined with woven copper mesh to accompany the bug-zapper (my repurposed microwave oven), and there's no way I could order a Faraday cage from one of the stores without setting off alarms.
It takes me nearly two weeks to weave a square meter of copper wire broadcloth, working in darkness by touch alone. It's really fiddly stuff to work with. The strands keep breaking or bending, it takes ages to strip the insulation, and besides, I've got a day job to go to.
Janis is complaining about minor back pains and spending a lot of time in the toilet each morning, coming out looking pale. There are fewer wisecracks and jokes from her, which is a shame. She's beginning to bulge around the waist, too. She's putting a brave face on it, but I think underneath it all she's terrified. The prospect of giving birth like an animal (with all the attendant risk and pain) is enough to scare anybody, even if it didn't come with the added horror of being chained down in this place for the indefinite hereafter, the product of your blood and sweat held hostage against your cooperation. What I want to know is, why isn't there a resistance movement? I suppose in a panopticon anyone organizing such a thing would have to be very quiet about it—or very naive—but I can't help wondering why I haven't seen any signs of even covert defiance.
I checked the YFH-Polity constitution in the library (there's a copy on a lectern out front, for everybody to read) and what's missing from it is as important as what's there. There's a bill of rights that explicitly includes the phrase "right to life" (which, if you read some dark ages histories, doesn't mean what a naive modern would think it means), and it goes on to explicitly waive all expectations of a right to privacy, which means they can enforce it against my will. Ick. The constitution is a public protocol specification defining the parameters within which YFH's legal system operates. Before I came here, it seemed irrelevant, but now it terrifies me—and I notice that it says nothing about a commitment to freedom of movement. That's been an axiom for virtually all human polities, ever since the end of the censorship wars mopped up the last nests of Curious Yellow and the memetic dictatorships. Not that you'll find any such knowledge in our shelves; history stops in 2050, as far as your reading in this library goes, and anyway, everything after 2005 is accessible only via the computer terminals, using an arcane conversational text interface that I'm still fumblingly trying to explore.
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 much thicker. What's happening? ) I hunch over the desk, gripping the pen tightly enough that it forms a painful furrow beside the first joint of my middle finger as I scratch laborious tracks across the fibrous sheets.
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.