"But I, II mean, you could have" Sam holds a soup bowl in front of himself as if it's some kind of shield, and he's trying to keep me at bay.
I glare at him. "Don't say it."
"I" He swallows. "Here, take it."
I take the bowl.
"I think I know what you thought I was going to say and you're right and I take it back even though I didn't say it. All right?" He says it very fast, running the words together as if he's nervous.
"You didn't say it."
I put the bowl down very carefully, because there really is no need to throw it at his head, and also because, once I calm down a fraction, I realize that in point of fact he's right, and he didn't say that if I'd fucked him the other night and become pregnant it would have been all my own fault. Smart Sam.
"It takes two to hold a grudge match." I lick my lips. "Sam, I'm very sorry about the other night." What comes next is hard to force out. "I shouldn't have taken advantage of you. I've been going through a bad patch, but that's no excuse. I'm notI've never beenparticularly good at self-restraint, but it won't happen again." And if it does, you won't get an apology like this, that's for sure. "Much as I like you, you're not big on poly and this, this shit" My shoulders are shaking.
"You don't have to apologize," he says, and takes a step forward. Before I know what's happening he's hugging me, and it really is good to feel his arms around me. "It's my fault, too. I should have more self-control and I knew all along you were getting interested in me, and I shouldn't have put myself in a position where you might have thought"
I sniff. "Shit!" I yell, and let go of him then spin round.
The soup is boiling over and there's a nasty smell from the burner. I kill the power and grab the handle to shift it somewhere safe, then hunt around for something to mop it up with. While I'm doing that Sam, like a zombie with a priority instruction, keeps methodically unloading the washing machine and transferring crockery to the cupboards. Eventually I get what's left of my soup into a bowl and pile my slices of bread on a plate, wondering why I didn't just use the microwave oven in the first place.
"By the time I get to eat this, it'll all be cold."
"My fault." He looks apologetic. "If I'd let you get on with it"
"Uh-huh." We're apologizing to each other for breathing loudly, what's wrong with us? "Listen, here's a question for you. You know the contract you, uh, signeddo you remember if there was a maximum duration on participation?"
"A maximum ?" He looks startled. "It just said minimum one hundred megs. Why?"
"Figures." I pick up my plate and bowl and head toward the living room. "Human neonates hatched in the wild in primitive conditions took at least half a gigasec to reach maturity."
"Are you"he's following me"saying what I think you're saying?"
I put my bowl and plate down on the end table beside the sofa and perch on the arm, because if I sit on the sofa, it'll try to swallow me for good. "Why don't you tell me what you think I'm saying?"
"I don't know." Which means he doesn't want to say. He sits down at the other end of the sofa and stares at me. "We're being watched, aren't we? All the time. Do you think it's wise to talk about it?"
I blow on my soup to speed evaporative cooling. "No, but there's no point being paranoid, is there? There are going to be a hundred of us in here in time, at least. I suspect we outnumber the experimenters twenty to one. Are you telling me they're going to monitor the real-time take on everything we say to each other, as we say it? A lot of the netlink score incidents are preprogrammedjust events we happen to trigger. Someone has an orgasm in proximity to their spouse, netlink triggers. A bunch of zombies see someone damaging property or removing clothing in public, their netlinks trigger. It doesn't mean someone is sitting on the switch watching the monitors all the time. Does it?"
(Actually it's possible that this is the case, if we're in a panopticon prison run by spooks rather than half-assed academics, but I'm not going to tell them that I know this, assuming they exist. No way. Especially as I don't know why I know this.)
"But if we're being watched"
"Listen." I put my spoon down. "We are here for a minimum of three years, maximum term unspecified, and we are fertile. That sounds to me like what they've got in mind involves breeding a population of genuine dark ages citizens. This is a separate polity, in case you'd forgotten, which means it has a defensible frontierthe assembler that generated these bodies we're wearing. Assemblers don't just make things, they filter things: They're firewalls. Polities are de facto independent networks of tightly connected T-gates defined by the firewalls that shield their edges from whatever tries to come in through their longjump T-gates. Their borders, in other words. But you can have a polity without internal T-gates; what defines it is the frontier, not the interior. We're functioning under YFH's rules. Doesn't that mean that anyone born into the place will be under the same rules, too?"
"But what about freedom of movement?" Sam looks antsy. "Surely they can't stop them if they want to emigrate?"
"Not if they don't know there's an outside universe to emigrate to," I say grimly. I take a spoonful of soup and wince, burning the roof of my mouth. "Ouch. We aren't supposed to talk about our earlier lives. What if they tighten the score system a bit more, so that mentioning the outside in front of children, or in public, costs us points? Then how are the nubes going to figure it out?"
"That's crazy." He jerks his head from side to side emphatically. "Why would anyone want to do that? I can understand the original purpose of the experiment, to research the social circumstances of the dark ages by experimental archaeology. But trying to create a whole population of orthos, stuck in this crazy dark ages sim and not even knowing it's a historical re-enactment rather than the real universe... !"
"I'm not sure yet," I say tiredly. "I'm not at all sure what it's about. But that's the point. We're missing essential data."
"Right, right." He looks pained. "Do you suppose it's anything to do with why they were picking people straight out of memory surgery?"
"Yes, that's got to be part of it." I gaze at him across a cold continental rift of sofa. "But that's only a part." I was going to say we have to get out of here, but that's not enough anymore. And despite what I've just said publicly, there's stuff that I'm not going to talk about. Like, I don't think we'll ever be allowed out. I don't know if this will ever end. If the child thing is true, they may be prepared to hold us here indefinitely, or worse. And that's leaving aside the most important questions: Why? And why us?
I go to work the next day, and the one after that, and by the end of my third day I am exhausted. I mean, shattered . Library work doesn't sound as if it should be hard, but when you're working for eleven hours with a one-hour break in the middle for lunch, it wears you down. The daytime is almost empty, but there's a small rush of custom every evening around six o'clock, and I have to scurry to and fro hunting for tickets, filing returned books, collecting fines, and getting things sorted out. Then in the morning I end up pushing a trolley loaded with books around the shelves, returning the borrowed items and sorting out anything that's been put back on a shelf out of sequence. If there's any time left over, I end up dusting the shelves that are due for cleaning.