Glasshouse

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, signed—do 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 preprogrammed—just 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 frontier—the 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 co

"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.

"How do you know the books know when they're being read?" I ask Janis, halfway through my second morning. "I mean, take this one." I heft it where she can see it, a big green clothbound sheaf of papers with a title like The Home Vegetable Garden.

"Look." Janis takes it from me and bends the cover back, so that the plastic protective sleeve on the spine bends.

I look. "Aha." I can just see something like a squashed fly in there, two hair-fine ante

"Fiber optics. That's my guess." Janis hums to herself as she closes the book and slides it back into the trolley. "I don't think they can hear you, but they can sense which page is open and track your eyeballs. The experimenters have been careful to give us all different faces, and we all have two working eyes. That's no accident. Not all the ancients had that. If you want to read a book secretly, you need mirrored sunglasses and a timer, so you turn each page after the same amount of time."

"How do you know all this?" I ask admiringly. "You sound like a professional—" The word spy is on the tip of my tongue, but I swallow it with a little shiver.

"Before I checked into the clinic, I used to be a detective." She gives me a long look. "It's a skill set I didn't ask them to erase. Thought it might come in handy in my new life."

"Then what did you—" I stop myself just in time. "Forget I asked."

"By all means." She chuckles drily. "Listen, they tell me that it's normal for me to check into hospital a week or two before the delivery, and to stay there for a couple of weeks afterward. Can I"—she sounds tentative—"ask a big favor of you?"

"What? Sure," I say blankly.

"I figure I'm going to be in bed a lot of the time, bored out of my mind, and there's only so much television you can watch in a day, and Norm is working, so he can't keep me company. Would you mind visiting me and bringing me some library books? So I don't lose track?"