Glasshouse

Luckily forgetfulness, like death, is reversible these days. Go to the House of Rishael the Exceptional in Block 54-Honey-September in the Polity of the Jade Sunrise and, after presenting a tissue sample, ask to speak to Jordaan. Jordaan will explain how to recover my latest imprint from escrow and how to merge the imprint block back into your mind. It's a difficult process, but it's stuff that belongs to you and brought you deep happiness when you were me. In fact, it's the stuff that makes me myself—and the lack of which defines who you are in relation to me.

Incidentally, one of the things you'll find in the imprint is the memory of how to access a trust fund with a quarter million écus in it.

(Yes, I'm a manipulative worm: I want you to become me again, sooner or later. Don't worry, you're a manipulative worm, too—you must be, if you're alive to read this letter.)

Now, the basics.

You are recovering from deep memory erasure surgery. You are probably thinking that once you recover you'll go and spend the usual wanderjahr looking for a vocation, find somewhere to live, meet friends and lovers, and set up a life for yourself. Wrong. The reason you are recovering from memory erasure surgery is that the people you work for have noticed a disturbing pattern of events centered on the Clinic of the Blessed Singularity run by the order of surgeon-confessors at City Zone Darke in the Invisible Republic. People coming out of surgery are being offered places in a psychological/historical research project aimed at probing the social conditions of the first dark age by live role-play. Some of these people have very questionable histories: in some cases, questionable to the point of being fugitive war criminals.

Your mission (and no, you don't have any choice—I already committed us to it) is to go inside the YFH-Polity, find out what's going on, then come back out to tell us. Sounds simple, doesn't it?

There's a catch. The research community has been established inside a former military prison, a glasshouse that was used as a reprogramming and rehabilitation center after the war. It was widely believed to be escape-proof at the time, and it's certainly a very secure facility. Other agents have already gone in. One very experienced colleague of yours vanished completely, and is now over twenty megs past their criticality deadline. Another reappeared eleven megaseconds late, reported to the prearranged debriefing node, and detonated a concealed antimatter device, killing the instance of their case officer who was in attendance.

I believe that both agents were compromised because they were injected into the glasshouse with extensive prebriefing and training. We have no idea what to expect on the other side of the longjump gate into YFH-Polity, but their security is tight. We expect extensive border firewalls and a focused counterespionage operation supported by the surveillance facilities of a maximum-security prison. There is likely to be stateful examination of your upload vector, and careful background checks before you are admitted. This is why I am about to undergo deep memory excision. Simply put, what you don't know can't betray you.

Incidentally, if you're experiencing lucid dreams about this stuff, it means you're overdue. This is the secondary emergent fallback briefing.I'm about to have these memories partially erased—unlinked, but not destroyed—before I go into the clinic in City Zone Darke. It's a matter of erasing the associative links to the data, not the data itself. They'll re-emerge given sufficient time, hopefully even after the surgeon-confessors go after the other memories that I'll be asking them to redact. They can't erase what I don't know I've already forgotten.

What is the background to your mission?

I can tell you very little. Our records are worryingly incomplete, and to some extent this is a garbage trawl triggered by the coincidence of the names Yourdon, Fiore, and Hanta cropping up in the same place.

During the censorship wars, Curious Yellow infected virtually every A-gate in the Republic of Is. We don't know who released Curious Yellow, or why, because Curious Yellow appears to have been created for the sole purpose of delivering a psywar payload designed to erase all memories and data pertaining to something or other. By squatting the assemblers, Curious Yellow ensured that anyone who needed medical care, food, material provisions, or just about any of the necessities of civilization, had to submit to censorship. Needless to say, some of us took exception to this, and the subsequent civil war—in which the Republic of Is shattered into the current system of firewalled polities—resulted in a major loss of data about certain key areas. In particular, the key services provided by the Republic—a common time framework and the ability to authenticate identities—were broken. The situation was complicated, after the defeat of the Curious Yellow censorship worm, by the emergence of quisling dictatorships whose leaders took advantage of the Curious Yellow software to spread their own pernicious ideologies and power structures. In the ensuing chaos, even more information was lost.

Among the things we know very little about are the history and origins of certain military perso

What we know about the sleeper cells is this: In the last few megasecs of the war, before the alliance succeeded in shattering and then sanitizing the last remaining networks of Curious Yellow, some of the quisling dictatorships' higher echelons went underground. It is now almost two gigaseconds since the end of the war, and most people dismiss the concept of Curious Yellow revenants as fantasy. However, I don't believe in ignoring threats just because they sound far-fetched. If Curious Yellow really did create sleeper cells, secondary pockets of infection designed to break out long after the initial wave was suppressed, then our collective failure to pursue them is disastrously shortsighted. And I am particularly worried because some aspects of the YFH-Polity experimental protocol, as published, sound alarmingly amenable to redirection along these lines.

My biggest reason for wanting you to have undergone major memory erasure prior to injection into YFH-Polity is this: I suspect that when the incoming experimental subjects are issued with new bodies, they are filtered through an A-gate infected with a live, patched copy of Curious Yellow. Therefore preemptive memory redaction is the only sure way of preventing such a verminiferous gate from identifying you as a threat for its owners to eliminate.

I watch myself writing this letter to myself. I can read it as clearly as if it's engraved in my own flesh. But I can't see any marks in the paper, because my old self has forgotten to dip his pen in the ink, and he's long since fallen to scratching invisible indentations on the coarse sheets. I seem to stand behind his shoulder although his head is nowhere in my field of vision, and I try to scream at him, No! No! That isn't how you do it! But nothing comes out because this is a dream, and when I try to grab the pen, my hand passes right through his wrist, and he keeps writing on my naked brain with his ink of blood and neurotransmitters.