Glasshouse

Which leaves me with nothing to do now but go see this orientation lecture and "cheese and wine reception." So I pick up my tablet, open the door, and go.

THERE'S a wide but narrow room on the far side of the door. I've just come out of one of twelve doors that open off three of the walls, which are painted flat white. The floor is tiled in black and white squares of marble. The fourth wall, opposite my door, is paneled in what I recognize after a moment as sheets of wood—your actual dead trees, killed and sliced into planks—with two doors at either side that are propped open. I guess that's where the lecture is due to be held, although why they can't do it in netspace is beyond me. I walk over to the nearest open door, a

There are seven or eight other people already inside a big room, with several rows of uncomfortable-looking chairs drawn up before a podium that stands before a white-painted wall. We—I've got to get used to the idea that I'm a voluntary participant, even if I don't feel like one right now—are a roughly even mix of orthohuman males and females, all in historical costume. The costume seems to follow an intricate set of rules about who's allowed to wear what garments, and everybody is wearing a surprising amount of fabric, given that we're in a controlled hab. Those of us who are female have been given one-piece dresses or skirts that fall to the knee, in combination with tops that cover our upper halves. The men are wearing matching jacket and trouser combinations over shirts with some sort of uncomfortable-looking collar and scarf arrangement at the neck. Most of the clothing is black and white or gray and white, and remarkably drab.

Apart from the archaic costume there are other anomalies—none of the males have long hair, and none of the females have short hair, at least where I can see it. A couple of heads turn as I walk in, but I don't feel out of place, even with my long hair yanked back in a ponytail. I'm just another anonymous figure in historic drag. "Is this the venue for the lecture?" I ask the nearest person, a tall male—probably no taller than I used to be, but I find myself looking up at him from my new low vantage—with black hair and a neatly trimmed facial mane.

"I think so," he says slowly, and shrugs, then looks uncomfortable. Not surprising, as his outfit looks as if it's strangling him slowly. "Did you just come through? I found a READ ME in my room after my last backup—"

"Yeah, me, too," I say. I clutch the tablet under my arm and smile up at him. I can recognize nervous chatter when I hear it and Big Guy looks every bit as uneasy as I feel. "Do you remember signing, or did you do that after your backup, too?"

"I'm not the only one?" He looks relieved. "I was in rehab," he says hastily. "Coming out of the crazy patch you go through. Then I woke up here—"

"Yeah, whatever." I nod, losing interest. "Me too. When is it starting?"

A door I hadn't noticed before opens in the white wall at the back and a plump male ortho walks in. This one is wearing a long white coat held shut with archaic button fasteners up the front, and he waddles as he walks, like a fat, self-satisfied amphibian. His hair is black and falls in lank, greasy-looking locks on either side of his face, longer than that of any of the other males here. He walks to the podium and makes a disgusting throat-clearing noise to get our attention.

"Welcome! I'm glad you agreed to come to our little introductory talk today. I'd like to apologize for requiring you to come in person, but because we're conducting this research project under rigorous conditions of consistency, we felt we should stay within the functional parameters of the society we are simulating. They'd do it this way, with a face-to-face meeting, so . . . if you would all like to take seats?"

We take a while to sort ourselves out. I end up in the front row, sitting between Big Guy and a female with freckled pale skin and coppery red hair, not unlike Li

The person on the podium gets started. "I am Major-Doctor Fiore, and I worked with Colonel-Professor Yourdon on the design of the experimental protocol. I'm here to start by explaining to you what we're trying to achieve, albeit—I hope you'll understand—leaving out anything that might prejudice your behavior within the trial polity." He smiles as if he's just cracked a private joke.

"The first dark ages." He throws out his chest and takes a deep breath when he's about to say something he thinks is significant. "The first dark ages lasted about three gigaseconds, compared to the seven gigaseconds of the censorship wars. But to put things in perspective, the first dark ages neatly spa

Big Guy mutters something under his breath. It takes me a moment to decode it: What a pompous oaf. I stifle a titter of amusement because it's no laughing matter. This pompous oaf holds my future in his hands for the next tenth of a gigasec. I want to catch his next words.

"We know why the dark age happened," Fiore continues. "Our ancestors allowed their storage and processing architectures to proliferate uncontrollably, and they tended to throw away old technologies instead of virtualizing them. For reasons of commercial advantage, some of their largest entities deliberately created incompatible information formats and locked up huge quantities of useful material in them, so that when new architectures replaced old, the data became inaccessible.

"This particularly affected our records of personal and household activities during the latter half of the dark age. Early on, for example, we have a lot of film data captured by amateurs and home enthusiasts. They used a thing called a cine camera, which captured images on a photochemical medium. You could actually decode it with your eyeball. But a third of the way into the dark age, they switched to using magnetic storage tape, which degrades rapidly, then to digital storage, which was even worse because for no obvious reason they encrypted everything. The same sort of thing happened to their audio recordings, and to text. Ironically, we know a lot more about their culture around the begi

Fiore stops. Behind me a couple of quiet conversations have broken out. He seems mildly a

"Will you let me continue?" Fiore asks pointedly, glaring at a female in the row behind me.

"Only if you tell us what this has got to do with us," she says cheekily.