Glasshouse Read Online Free PDF Page B

to lurch out of my chest, and I break out in a cold sweat. I reach up carefully to stroke the side of her face. I’m about to suggest she shouldn’t sneak up on me, but I can visualize her smiling, and something makes me take a more friendly tone. “I was wondering if I’d see you here.”
    â€œHappens.” The hands vanish from my eyes as she lets go of me. I twist round to see her impish grin. “I’m not disturbing anything important, am I?”
    â€œOh, hardly. I’ve just had my fill of studying, and it’s time to relax.” I grin ruefully. And I would be relaxing if you weren’t giving me fight-or-flight attacks!
    â€œGood.” She slides into the booth beside me, leans up against my side, and snaps her fingers at the menu. Moments later a long, tall something or other that varies from gold at the top to blue at the bottom arrives in a glass of flash-frozen ice that steams slightly in the humid air. I can see horse-head ripples in the mist, blue steam-trails of self-similarity. “I’m never sure whether it’s polite to ask people if they want to socialize—the conventions are too different from what I’m used to.”
    â€œOh, I’m easy.” I finish my own drink and let the table reabsorb my glass. “Actually, I was thinking about a meal. Are you by any chance hungry?”
    â€œI could be.” She chews her lower lip and looks at me pensively. “You said you were hoping to see me.”
    â€œYes. I was wondering about the, uh, greeter thing. Who runs it, and whether they need any volunteers.”
    She blinks and looks me up and down. “You think you’re sufficiently in control? You want to volunteer to—remarkable!” One of my external triggers twitches, telling me that she’s accessing my public metadata, the numinous cloud of medical notes that follow us all around like a swarm of phantom bees, ready to sting us into submission at the first sign of undirected aggression. “You’ve made really good progress!”
    â€œI don’t want to be a patient forever.” I probably sound a bit defensive. Maybe she doesn’t realize she’s rubbed me up the wrong way, but I really don’t like being patronized.
    â€œDo you know what you’re going to do when your control metrics are within citizenship bounds?” she asks.
    â€œNo idea.” I glance at the menu. “Hey, I’ll have one of whatever she’s drinking,” I tell the table.
    â€œWhy not?” She sounds innocently curious. Maybe that’s why I decide to tell her the unembellished truth.
    â€œI don’t know much about who I am. I mean, whoever I was before, he put me in for a maximum wash, didn’t he? I don’t remember what my career was, what I used to do, even what I was interested in. Tabula rasa, that’s me.”
    â€œOh my.” My drink emerges from the table. She looks as if she doesn’t know whether to believe me or not. “Do you have a family? Any friends?”
    â€œI’m not sure,” I admit. Which is a white lie. I have some very vague memories of growing up, some of them vivid in a stereotyped way that suggests crude enhancement during a previous memory wash—memories I’d wanted to preserve at all costs, two proud mothers watching my early steps across a black sandy beach . . . and I have a strong but baseless conviction that I’ve had long-term partners, at least a gigasecond of domesticity. And there are faint memories of coworkers, phantoms of former Cats. But try as I might, I can’t put a face to any of them, and that’s a cruel realization to confront. “I have some fragments, but I’ve got a feeling that before my memory surgery I was pretty solitary. Anorganization person, a node in a big machine. Can’t remember what kind of machine, though.” Fresh-spilled blood bubbling and fizzing in vacuum.