Glasshouse

4. Shopping

REEVE and Sam Brown—not their, our , real names—are a middle-class couple circa 1990–2010, from the middle of the dark ages. They are said to be "married," which means they live together and notionally observe a mono relationship with formal approval from their polity's government and the ideological/religious authorities. It is a publicly respectable role.

For purposes of the research project, the Browns are currently both unemployed but have sufficient savings to live comfortably for a "month" or thereabouts while they put their feet down and seek work. They have just moved into a suburban split-level house with its own garden—apparently a vestigial agricultural installation maintained for aesthetic or traditional reasons—on a road with full-grown trees to either side separating them from other similar-looking houses. A "road" is an open-walled access passage designed to facilitate ground transport by automobile and truck. (I think I have seen automobiles somewhere, once, but what's a "truck"?) At this point the simulation breaks down, because although this environment is meant to mimic the appearance of a planetary surface, the "sky" is actually a display surface about ten meters above our heads, and the "road" vanishes into tu

Our house . . .

I step out of the closet Sam and I materialized in and look around. The closet is in some kind of shed, with a rough ceramic-tiled floor and thin transparent wall panels (called "windows," according to Sam) held in a grid of white plastic strips that curve overhead. There's stuff everywhere. Baskets with small colorful plants hanging from the wall, a door—made of strips of wood, cu

"I thought this was meant to be an apartment?" I say.

"They weren't good at privacy." Sam is looking around as if trying to identify artifacts that mean something to him. "They had no anonymity in public. No T-gates either. So they used to keep all their private space at home, in one structure. It's called a ‘house' or a ‘building,' and it has lots of rooms. This is just the vestibule."

"If you say so." I feel like an idiot. Inside the house itself I find myself in a passageway. There are doors on three sides. I wander from room to room, gawping in disbelief.

The ancients had carpet. It's thick enough to deaden the a

I prowl around the upstairs corridor, opening doors and trying to puzzle out the purpose of the rooms to either side. They separate rooms by function, but most of them seem to have multiple uses. One of them might be a bathroom, but it's too large and appears to be jammed—all the hygiene modules are extended and frozen simultaneously, as if it's crashed. A couple of the rooms have sleeping platforms in them, and other stuff, big wooden cabinets. I look in one, but there's nothing but a pole extending from one side to the other with some kind of hooked carrier slung over it.

It's all very puzzling. I sit down on the bed and pull out my tablet just as it dings for attention. What now? I ask myself.

The tablet's sprouted a button and an arrow and it says, POINT AT OBJECT TO IDENTIFY.

Okay, so this must be the help system, I think. Relieved, I point it at the boxy cabinet and press the button.

WARDROBE. Storage cabinet for clothes awaiting use. Note: used clothing can be cleaned in the UTILITY ROOM in the basement by means of the WASHING MACHINE. As new arrivals, you have only one set of clothes. Suggested task for tomorrow—go downtown and buy new clothes.

My feet itch. I kick my shoes off impulsively, glad to be rid of those a

I wait for my head to stop spi

I find Sam slumped in one corner of a huge sofa in the living room, facing a chunky black box with a curved lens that shows colorful but flat images. It's making a lot of indistinct noise. "What is that?" I ask him, and he almost jumps out of his skin.

"It's called a television," he says. "I am watching football."

"Uh-huh." I walk round the sofa and sit down halfway along it, close enough to reach out and take his hand, but far enough away to maintain separation if both of us want to. I peer at the pictures. Some kind of mecha—no, they're ortho males, right? In armor—are forming groups facing each other. They're color coded. "Why are you watching this?" I ask. One of them throws something alarmingly like an assault mine at the other group of orthos, who try to jump on it. Then they begin ru

"It's supposed to be a popular entertainment." Sam shakes his head. "I thought if I watched it I might understand more—"

"What's the most important thing we can understand?" I ask, leaning toward him. "The experiment, or how to live in it?"

He sighs and picks up a black knobby rectangle, points it at the box, and waits for the picture to fade to black. "The tablet said I ought to try it," he admits.

"My tablet said we have to go and buy clothing tomorrow. We've only got what we're wearing, and apparently it gets dirty and smelly really fast. We can't just throw it away and make more, we have to buy it downtown." A thought strikes me. "What do we do when we get hungry?"

"There's a kitchen." He nods at the doorway to the room with the appliances that puzzled me. "But if you don't know how to use it, we can order a meal using the telephone. It's a voice-only network terminal."

"What do you mean, if you don't know how?" I ask him, raising an eyebrow.