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with an occupation and expected to work, and introduced to a community of peers who are all in the same situation as you. Comradeship and a renewed sense of purpose are likely side effects of this experiment. Meanwhile you will have time to cultivate your personal interests and select a direction that fits your new identity, without pressure from former associates or acquaintances. And I repeat, you will be paid handsomely for your participation.” Piccolo-47 pauses for a moment. “You have already met one of your fellow participants,” he adds.
    A hit.
    â€œI’ll think about it,” I say noncommittally. “Send me the details and I’ll think about it. But I’m not going to say yes or no on the spot.” I grin wider, baring my teeth. “I don’t like being pressured.”
    â€œI understand.” Piccolo-47 rises slightly and moves backward a meter or so. “Please excuse me. I am very enthusiastic for the experiment to proceed successfully.”
    â€œSure.” I wave it off. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I really do need some privacy. I still sleep, you know.”
    â€œI will see you in approximately one diurn,” says Piccolo-47, rising farther and rotating toward a hole that is irising open in the ceiling. “Goodbye.” Then it’s gone, leaving only a faint smell of lavender behind, and me to the strikingly vivid memory of the taste and feel of Kay’s tongue exploring my lips.

2

Experiment
    WELCOME to the Invisible Republic.
    The Invisible Republic is one of the legacy polities that emerged from the splinters of the Republic of Is, in the wake of the series of censorship wars that raged five to ten gigaseconds ago. During the wars, the internetwork of longjump T-gates that wove the subnets of the hyperpower together was shattered, leaving behind sparsely connected nets, their borders filtered through firewalled assembler gates guarded by ferocious mercenaries. Incomers were subjected to forced disassembly and scanned for subversive attributes before being rebuilt and allowed across the frontiers. Battles raged across the airless cryogenic wastes that housed the longjump nodes carrying traffic between warring polities, while the redactive worms released by the Censor factions lurked in the firmware of every A-gate they could contaminate, their viral payload mercilessly deleting all knowledge of the underlying cause of the conflict from fleeing refugees as they passed through the gates.
    Like almost all human polities since the Acceleration, the Republic of Is relied heavily on A-gates for manufacturing, routing, switching, filtering, and the other essentials of any network civilization. The abilityof nanoassembler arrays to deconstruct and replicate artifacts and organisms from raw atomic feedstock made them virtually indispensable—not merely for manufacturing and medical purposes, but for virtual transport (it’s easier to simultaneously cram a hundred upload templates through a T-gate than a hundred physical bodies) and molecular firewalling. Even when war exposed them to subversion by the worms of censorship, nobody wanted to do without the A-gates—to grow old and decrepit, or succumb to injury, seemed worse than the risk of memory corruption. The paranoid few who refused to pass through the verminous gates dropped away, dying of old age or cumulative accidental damage; meanwhile, those of us who still used them can no longer be certain of whatever it was that the worm payloads were designed to hide in the first place. Or even who the Censors were.
    But the stress of the censorship caused people to distrust all gates that they didn’t control themselves. You can’t censor data or mass flowing through a T-gate, which is simply a wormhole of twisted space-time connecting two distant points. So even short-range traffic switched to T-gates, while new mass assemblies became scarce because of generalized distrust of the