Glasshouse

"I'm just repeating what the tablet says." Sam sounds a little defensive.

"Here, give that to me." He passes it and I rapidly read what he's looking at. Domestic duties: the people of the dark ages, when living together, apparently divided up work depending on gender. Males held paid vocations; females were expected to clean and maintain the household, buy and prepare food, buy clothing, clean the clothing, and operate domestic machinery while their male worked. "This is crap!" I say.

"You think so?" He looks at me oddly.

"Well, yeah. It's straight out of the most primitive nontech anthro cultures. No advanced society expects half its workforce to stay home and divides labor on arbitrary lines. I don't know what their source for this rubbish is, but it's not plausible. If I had to guess, I'd say they've mistaken radical prescriptive documentation for descriptive." I tap my finger on his slate. "I'd like to see some serious social conditions surveys before I took this as fact. And in any event, we don't have to live that way, even if it's how they direct the majority of the zombies in the polity. This is just a general guideline; every culture has lots of outliers."

Sam looks thoughtful. "So you think they've got it wrong?"

"Well, I'm not going to say that for certain until I've reviewed their primary sources and tried to isolate any bias, but there's no way I'm doing all the housework." I grin, to take some of the sting out of it. "What were you saying about being able to request food using the ‘telephone'?"

DINNER is a circular, baked, bread-type thing called a pizza. There's cheese on it, but also tomato paste and other stuff that makes it more palatable. It's hot and greasy and it comes to us via the shortjump gate in the closet in the conservatory, rather than on a ‘truck.' I'm a bit disappointed by this, but I guess the truck can wait until tomorrow.

Sam unwinds after di

"I'll do some research later." We're still on the sofa, with open pizza boxes balanced on our laps, eating the greasy hot slices of food with our fingers. "Sam, why did you volunteer for the experiment?"

"Why?" He looks panicky.

"You're shy, you're not good in social situations. They told us up front we'd have to live in a dark ages society for a tenth of a gigasec with no way out. Didn't it strike you as not being a sensible thing to do?"

"That's a very personal question." He crosses his arms.

"Yes, it is." I stop talking and stare at him.

For a moment he looks so sad that I wish I could take the words back. "I had to get away," he mumbles.

"From what?" I put my box down and pad across the carpet to a large wooden chest with drawers and compartments full of bottles of liquor. I take two glasses, open a bottle, sniff the contents—you can never be sure until you try it—and pour. Then I carry them back over to the sofa and pass him one.

"When I came out of rehab." He stares at the television, which is peculiar because the machine is switched off. Under his shoes he's wearing some sort of short, thick hose. His toes twitch uneasily. "Too many people recognized me. I was afraid. It's my fault, I think, but they might have hurt me if I'd stayed."

"Hurt you?" Sam is big and has thick hair and isn't very fast moving, and he seems to be very gentle. I've been thinking that maybe I lucked out with him—there's potential for abuse in this atomic relationship thing, but he's so shy and retiring that I can't see him being a problem.

"I was a bit crazy," he says. "You know the dissociative psychopathic phase some people go through after deep memory redaction? I was really bad. I kept forgetting to back up and I kept picking fights and people kept having to kill me in self-defense. I made a real fool of myself. When I came out of it . . ." He shakes his head. "Sometimes you just want to go and hide. Perhaps I hid too well."

I look at him sharply. I don't believe you , I decide. "We all make fools of ourselves from time to time," I say, trying to hang a reassuring message on the observation. "Here, try this." I raise my glass. "It says it's vodka."

"To forgetfulness." He raises his glass to me. "And tomorrow."

I wake up alone in a strange room, lying on a sleeping platform under a sack of fiber-stuffed fabric. For a few panicky moments I can't remember where I am. My head's sore, and there's a gritty feeling in my eyes: If this is life in the dark ages, you can keep it. At least nobody's trying to kill me right now , I tell myself, trying to come up with something to feel good about. I roll out of bed, stretch, and head for the bathroom.

It's my fault for being so distracted. On my way back to my bedroom to get dressed I walk headfirst into Sam. He's naked and bleary-eyed and looks half-asleep, and I sort of plaster myself across his chest. "Oof," I say, right as he says, "Are you all right?"

"I think so." I push back from him a few centimeters and look up at his face. "I'm sorry. You?"

He looks worried. "We were going to buy clothes and, uh, stuff. Weren't we?"

I realize, momentarily u

It's a touchy moment, but then he shakes his head, breaking the tension: "Yes." He yawns. "Can I go to the bathroom first?"

"Sure." I step aside and he shambles past me. I turn to watch him. I don't know how I feel about this, about sharing a "house" with a stranger who is stronger and bigger than I am and who has a self-confessed history of impulsive violent episodes. But . . . who am I to criticize? By the time I'd known Kay this long, we'd gone to a wild orgy together and fucked each other raw, and if that isn't impulsive behavior, I don't know . . . maybe Sam's right. Sex is an unpleasant complication here, especially before we know what the rules are. If there are rules. Vague memories are trying to surface: I've got a feeling I was involved with both males and females back before my excision. Possibly poly, possibly bi—I can't quite remember. I shake my head, frustrated, and go back to my room to get into costume.

While I'm getting ready, I pick up my tablet. It tells me to look in the closet in the conservatory. I go downstairs and find the conservatory is chilly—don't these people have proper life support?—and inside the cupboard that held a T-gate yesterday there's now a blank wall and a couple of shelves. One of the shelves holds a couple of small bags made of dumb fabric. They've got lots of pockets, and when I open one I find it's full of rectangles of plastic with names and numbers on them. My tablet tells me that these are "credit cards," and we can use them to obtain "cash" or to pay for goods and services. It seems crude and clumsy, but I pick up the wallets all the same. I'm turning away from the door when my netlink chimes.

"Huh?" I look round. As I glance at the wallets in my hand a bright blue cursor lights up over them, and my netlink says, TWO POINTS. "What the—" I stop dead. My tablet chimes.

Tutorial: social credits are awarded and rescinded for behavior that complies with or violates public norms. This is an example. Your social credits may also rise or fall depending on your cohort's collective score. After termination of the simulation all individuals will receive a payment bonus proportional to their score; the highest-scoring cohort will receive a further bonus of 100% on their final payment.