REEVE and Sam Brown—not their, our , real names—are a middle-class couple circa 1990–2010, from the middle of the dark ages. They are said to be "married," which means they live together and notionally observe a mono relationship with formal approval from their polity's government and the ideological/religious authorities. It is a publicly respectable role.
For purposes of the research project, the Browns are currently both unemployed but have sufficient savings to live comfortably for a "month" or thereabouts while they put their feet down and seek work. They have just moved into a suburban split-level house with its own garden—apparently a vestigial agricultural installation maintained for aesthetic or traditional reasons—on a road with full-grown trees to either side separating them from other similar-looking houses. A "road" is an open-walled access passage designed to facilitate ground transport by automobile and truck. (I think I have seen automobiles somewhere, once, but what's a "truck"?) At this point the simulation breaks down, because although this environment is meant to mimic the appearance of a planetary surface, the "sky" is actually a display surface about ten meters above our heads, and the "road" vanishes into tunnels which conceal T-gate entrances, two hundred meters in either direction. There are cultivated barriers of vegetation to stop us walking into the walls. It's a pretty good simulation, considering that according to the tablet it's actually contained in a bunch of habitat cylinders (which orbit in the debris belts of three or four brown dwarf stars separated by a hundred trillion kilometers of vacuum), but it's not the real thing.
Our house . . .
I step out of the closet Sam and I materialized in and look around. The closet is in some kind of shed, with a rough ceramic-tiled floor and thin transparent wall panels (called "windows," according to Sam) held in a grid of white plastic strips that curve overhead. There's stuff everywhere. Baskets with small colorful plants hanging from the wall, a door—made of strips of wood, cunningly interlocking around a transparent panel—and so on. There's some kind of rough carpetlike mat in front of the door, the purpose of which is unclear. I push the door open, and what I see is even more confusing.
"I thought this was meant to be an apartment?" I say.
"They weren't good at privacy." Sam is looking around as if trying to identify artifacts that mean something to him. "They had no anonymity in public. No T-gates either. So they used to keep all their private space at home, in one structure. It's called a ‘house' or a ‘building,' and it has lots of rooms. This is just the vestibule."
"If you say so." I feel like an idiot. Inside the house itself I find myself in a passageway. There are doors on three sides. I wander from room to room, gawping in disbelief.
The ancients had carpet. It's thick enough to deaden the annoying clack-clack of my shoes. The walls are covered in some sort of fabric print, totally static but not unpleasant to look at. Windows in the front room look out across a hump of land planted with colorful flowers, and at the back across an expanse of close-cropped grass. The rooms are all full of furniture, chunky, heavy stuff, made of carved-up lumps of wood and metal, and a bit of what I assume must be structural diamond. They were big on rectilinear geometry, relegating curves to small objects and the odd obscure piece of dead-looking machinery. There's one room at the back with a lot of metal surfaces and what looks like an open-topped water tank in it, and there are odd machines dotted over the cabinet tops. There's another small room under the staircase with a recognizable but primitive-looking high-gee toilet in it.
I prowl around the upstairs corridor, opening doors and trying to puzzle out the purpose of the rooms to either side. They separate rooms by function, but most of them seem to have multiple uses. One of them might be a bathroom, but it's too large and appears to be jammed—all the hygiene modules are extended and frozen simultaneously, as if it's crashed. A couple of the rooms have sleeping platforms in them, and other stuff, big wooden cabinets. I look in one, but there's nothing but a pole extending from one side to the other with some kind of hooked carrier slung over it.
It's all very puzzling. I sit down on the bed and pull out my tablet just as it dings for attention. What now? I ask myself.
The tablet's sprouted a button and an arrow and it says, POINT AT OBJECT TO IDENTIFY.
Okay, so this must be the help system, I think. Relieved, I point it at the boxy cabinet and press the button.
WARDROBE. Storage cabinet for clothes awaiting use. Note: used clothing can be cleaned in the UTILITY ROOM in the basement by means of the WASHING MACHINE. As new arrivals, you have only one set of clothes. Suggested task for tomorrow—go downtown and buy new clothes.
My feet itch. I kick my shoes off impulsively, glad to be rid of those annoying heels. Then I shrug out of the black pocketless jacket and stash it in the wardrobe, using the hook-and-arm affair dangling from the bar. It looks lonely there, and I suddenly feel very odd. Everything here is overwhelmingly strange. How's Sam taking it? I wonder, feeling concerned; he wasn't doing so well in the reception session, and if this is as weird for him as it is for me . . .
I wait for my head to stop spinning before I go back downstairs. (A thought strikes me on the way. Am I supposed to wear the same outfit inside my ‘house' as I do in public? These people have a marked public/private split personality—they probably have different costumes for formal and informal events.) In the end, I leave the jacket but, a trifle regretfully, put the shoes back on.
I find Sam slumped in one corner of a huge sofa in the living room, facing a chunky black box with a curved lens that shows colorful but flat images. It's making a lot of indistinct noise. "What is that?" I ask him, and he almost jumps out of his skin.
"It's called a television," he says. "I am watching football."
"Uh-huh." I walk round the sofa and sit down halfway along it, close enough to reach out and take his hand, but far enough away to maintain separation if both of us want to. I peer at the pictures. Some kind of mecha—no, they're ortho males, right? In armor—are forming groups facing each other. They're color coded. "Why are you watching this?" I ask. One of them throws something alarmingly like an assault mine at the other group of orthos, who try to jump on it. Then they begin running and squabbling for ownership of the mine. After a moment someone blows a whistle and there's a roaring noise that I realize is coming from the crowd watching the—ritual? Competitive-self-execution? Game?—from rows of seats behind them.
"It's supposed to be a popular entertainment." Sam shakes his head. "I thought if I watched it I might understand more—"
"What's the most important thing we can understand?" I ask, leaning toward him. "The experiment, or how to live in it?"
He sighs and picks up a black knobby rectangle, points it at the box, and waits for the picture to fade to black. "The tablet said I ought to try it," he admits.
"My tablet said we have to go and buy clothing tomorrow. We've only got what we're wearing, and apparently it gets dirty and smelly really fast. We can't just throw it away and make more, we have to buy it downtown." A thought strikes me. "What do we do when we get hungry?"
"There's a kitchen." He nods at the doorway to the room with the appliances that puzzled me. "But if you don't know how to use it, we can order a meal using the telephone. It's a voice-only network terminal."
"What do you mean, if you don't know how?" I ask him, raising an eyebrow.
"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 dinner. I take off my shoes and hose and convince him he'll feel better without his jacket and the thing called a necktie—not that he needs much convincing. "I don't know why they wore these," he complains.
"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 unnerved, that we're both naked, he's taller than I am, and he's hairy all over. "Yes, we were," I say, watching him warily. All that hair : He's a lot less gracile than I'd normally go for, and then I realize he's looking at me as if he's never seen me before.
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.
"Okay." I hurry back inside to give Sam his wallet.
Sam is coming downstairs as I go inside. "Here," I say, holding both the wallets out to him, "this one is yours. Can you put these in a pocket for me until I buy one of those shoulder bags? I've got nowhere to put mine."
"Sure." He takes my stuff. "Did you read the tutorial?"
"I started to—I needed something to help me get to sleep. Let's . . . how do we get downtown?"
"I called a taxi. It'll be here to pick us up in a short while."
"Okay." I look him up and down. He's back in costume again. It still looks awkward. I can't help tapping my toes with impatience. "Clothing, first. For both of us. Where do we go? Do you know how the stuff is sold?"
"There's something called a department store, the tutorial said to start there. We might run into some of the others."
"Hmm." A thought strikes me. "I'm hungry. Think there'll be somewhere to eat?"
"Maybe."
Something large and yellow appears outside the door. "Is that it?" I ask.
"Who knows?" He looks twitchy. "Let's go see."
The yellow thing is a taxi, a kind of automobile you hire by the centisecond. There's a human operator up front, and something like a padded bench seat in the rear. We get in, and Sam leans forward. "Can you take us to the nearest department store?" he asks.
The operator nods. "Macy's. Downtown zone. That will be five dollars." He holds out a hand and I notice that his skin is perfectly smooth and he has no fingernails. Is he one of the zombies? I wonder. Sam hands over his "credit card" and the operator swipes it between his fingers, then hands it back. Sam sits back, then there's a lurch, and we're moving. The taxi makes various loud noises, so that I'm afraid it's about to suffer a systems malfunction—there's a loud rumbling from underneath and a persistent whine up front—but we turn into the road and accelerate toward the tunnel. A moment of darkness, then we're somewhere else, driving along a road between two short rows of gray-fronted buildings. The taxi stops and the door next to Sam clicks open. "We have arrived at downtown," says the operator. "Please disembark promptly."
Sam is frowning over his tablet, then straightens up. "This way," he says. Before I can ask why, he heads off toward one of the nearest buildings, which has a row of doors in it. I follow him.
Inside the store, I get lost fast. There's stuff everywhere, piled in heaps and stacked in storage bins, and there are lots of people wandering about. The ones in the odd-looking uniforms are shop operators who're supposed to help you find things and take your money. There are no assemblers and no catalogues, so I suppose they can only sell the stuff they've got on display, which is why it's all over the place. I ask one of the operators where I can find clothes, and she says, "on the third floor, ma'am." There are moving staircases in a central high-ceilinged room, so I head for the third level and look around.
Clothes. Lots of clothes. More clothes than I've ever imagined in one place—and all of them made of dumb fabric with no obvious way of finding what you want and getting it adjusted to the right size! How did they ever figure out what they needed? It's a crazy system, just putting everything in the middle of a big house and letting visitors take their chances. There are some other people walking around and fingering the merchandise, but when I approach them they turn out to be zombies, playing the part of real people. None of the others are here yet. I guess we must be early.
I wander through a forest of racks hung with jackets until I catch a shop operator. "You," I say. "What can I wear?"
She looks like an orthohuman female, wearing a blue skirt and jacket and those shoes with uncomfortable heels, and she smiles at me robotically. "What items do you require?" she asks.
"I need—" I stop. "I need underwear," I say. The stuff doesn't clean itself. "Enough for a week. I need some more pairs of hose"—since I tore the one on my left leg—"and another outfit identical to this one. And another set of shoes." A thought strikes me. "Can I have a pair of pants?"
"Please wait." The shop operator freezes. "Please come this way." She leads me to a lectern near a display of statues wearing flimsy long gowns, and another operator comes out of a door in the wall carrying a bundle of packages. "Here is your order. Pants, item not available in this department. Please identify a template, and we will supply correctly sized garments."
"Oh." I look around. "Can I choose anything here?"
"Yes."
I spend a couple of kiloseconds wandering the shop floor, looking for stuff to wear. They sell very few pants here, and they look damaged—made of a heavy blue fabric, ripped open at the knees. Eventually I end up in another corner of the store where there's a rack of trousers that look all right, plain black ones with no holes in them. "I want one of these in my size," I say to the nearest operator, a male one.
"Item not available in female fitting," he says.
"Oh. Great." I scratch my head. "Can you alter it?"
"Item not available in female fitting," he repeats. My netlink bings. A red icon appears over the rack of pants: SUMPTUARY VIOLATION.
"Hmm." So there are restrictions on what they'll sell to me? This is getting annoying. "Can you provide one in my size fitting? It's for a male exactly the same size as myself."
"Please wait." I wait, fidgeting impatiently. Eventually another male operator appears from an inconspicuous door in the shop wall, carrying a bundle. "Your gift item is here."
"Uh-huh." I take the pants, suppress a grin, and think about these irritating shoes and how . . . "Take me to the shoe department. I want a pair of shoes in my size fitting, for a male—"
When I pay using the "credit card," I score a couple more social points: I've made five so far.
I catch up with Sam down in the furniture department about five kiloseconds later. We're both massively overloaded with bags, but he's bought a portable container called a ‘suitcase' and we shove most of our purchases into it. I've bought a shoulder bag and a pair of ankle boots that have soft soles and don't clatter when I walk—I shoved my old shoes into the bag, just in case I need them for some reason—and I'm a lot more comfortable walking around now. "Let's go find somewhere to eat," he suggests.
"Okay." There's an eatery on the other side of the road from Macy's, and it's not unlike a real one, except that the food is delivered by human (no, zombie) attendants, and is supposed to be prepared by other humans in the kitchen. Luckily, this is a simulation, or I'd feel quite ill. For deep combat sweeps they teach you how to synthesize food from biological waste or your dead comrades, but that's different. This is supposed to be civilization, of a kind. We order from a menu printed on a sheet of white film, then sit back to wait for our food. "How did your shopping go?" I ask Sam.
"Not too badly," he says guardedly. "I bought underwear. And some trousers and tops. My tablet says there are a lot of social conventions surrounding clothing. Stuff we can wear, stuff we can't wear, stuff we must wear—it's a real mess."
"Tell me about it." I tell him about my difficulty ordering trousers that didn't have holes in them.
"It says—" He pulls his tablet out. "Ah, yes. Sumptuary conventions. It's not legally codified, but trousers weren't allowed for females early in the dark ages, and skirts weren't allowed for males at all." He frowns. "It also says the customs appear to have changed sometime around the middle of the period."
"You're going to stick by the book?" I ask him, as a zombie walks up and deposits a glass of pale yellow liquid called beer next to each of our settings.
"Well, they can always fine us," he says, shrugging. "But I suppose you're right. We don't have to do anything we're not comfortable with."
"Right." I hike my right leg up and put my foot on the table. "Look at this."
"It's a heavy boot."
"A boot from the males-only department. But they sized it for me when I told them it was a gift for a male the same size as me."
"Oh?"
I realize I'm showing the leg with the torn hose and put it back under the table. "We've got some autonomy, however limited. Now we're in here, we can live however we want, can't we?"
Plates of food arrive—synthetic steaks, fake vegetables designed to look as if they'd grown in a muddy corner of a wild biosphere, and cups of brightly colored condiments. For a while I busy myself with my plate. I'm really hungry, and the food is flavorsome, if a bit basic. At least we're not going to starve in here. I fill up quickly.
"I don't know if we can," Sam mumbles around a full mouth. "I mean, the points system—"
"Doesn't stop us doing anything," I interrupt, sliding my plate away. "All we have to do is to agree to ignore it, and we can do whatever we want."
"I suppose so." He forks another piece of steak into his mouth.
"Anyway, we've got no idea what they take to be a violation of the system. I mean, what do I have to do to lose a point? Or to gain points? They haven't actually told us anything, they've just said ‘obey the rules and collect points.' " I stab my fork in his direction. "We've got these reference texts in our tablets, all this stuff about how it's a genetically determinist society and there are all these silly customs, but I don't see how that can affect us unless we let it. All societies have some degree of flexibility, but these guys have just picked the first narrowly normative interpretation that came to hand. If you ask me, they're just plain lazy."
"What will the others think?" he asks.
"What will they think?" I stare at him. "We're here for a hundred megs. Do you really think they'll put a bonus payment at the end of the experiment ahead of, say, having to wear stupid pointy shoes that make your feet hurt for three years?"
"It depends." Sam puts his knife down. "It all depends on how they balance the relative convenience of making other people uncomfortable against their own future wealth." His expression is pensive. "The protocol is . . . interesting."
"Okay." I stand up. "Let's test it." I shrug out of my jacket and lay it over the back of my chair. A couple of the dining zombies look round. "Hey, look at me!" I yell. I unzip my dress and drop it around my ankles. Sam is startled. I watch his face as I reach behind my back and unlatch my breast halter, drop it, then step up onto my chair and push down my hose and G-string. "Look at me!" Sam looks up, and my face feels hot as I see his expression—
Then there's a red flash that blots out my visual field, and a loud chime from my netlink, like the decompression alert we all learn to fear before we can walk. MINUS TEN POINTS FOR PUBLIC NUDITY, says the link.
When my vision clears, I can see waitrons and the maître d' rushing toward me holding up towels and aprons, ready to do something, anything, to cover the horrible sight. Sam is still looking up at me, and I'm not the only one who's blushing. I climb down off the chair and three or four male zombies, all bigger than me, converge and between them pin my arms and carry me bodily into the back. I bite back a scream offright: I can't move! But they take me straight to the females-only lavatory and simply shove me through the door, on my own. A moment later, while I'm still trying to catch my breath, the door whips open and someone throws my discarded clothes at me.
Minus ten points, causing a public nuisance, intones my netlink. Police have been summoned. Help function advises you to correct your dress code infraction and leave.
Oh shit, shit . . . I scrabble around for a moment, pulling the dress over my head and then shrugging into the jacket. Underwear can wait—I don't know what these "police" are, but they don't sound good. I pull the door open and glance round the corner but there's nobody about, nothing but a short corridor with doors back to the restaurant and one that says FIRE ESCAPE in green letters. I shove it open and find myself standing in a narrow road with lots of wheeled containers. It stinks of decaying food. Shaking slightly, I walk to the end, then turn left, and left again.
Back on the road I walk right into Sam. "Now will you take the protocol seriously?" he hisses in my ear. "They nearly arrested me!"
"Arrested? What's that?"
"The police." He's breathing heavily. "They can take you away, lock you up. Detention, it's called." He's still flushed in the face and clearly concerned. "You could have been hurt."
I shiver. "Let's go home."
"I'll call a taxi," he says grumpily. "You've done enough damage for one day."
SAM has bought a thing called a cell phone—a pocket-sized replacement for the blocky network terminal wired into the wall. He keeps it in a pocket. He speaks to it for a while, and a few cents later a taxi pulls up. We go home, and he stomps into the living room, leaving the suitcase in the front hall, and turns on the television. I tiptoe around for a while before looking in on him to find that he's engrossed in the football, a faintly puzzled expression on his face.
I spend some time in my bedroom, reading from my own tablet. It's got lots of advice about how people lived in the dark ages, none of which makes much sense—most of what they did sounds arbitrary and silly when you strip it of the surrounding social context and the history that explains how their customs developed. The way my experiment in the restaurant backfired still burns me (how can not wearing clothes be so harmful in any rational social context?), but after a while I realize that I didn't get zapped this morning when I went around the house naked. So I take off my new boots, then my dress, which is beginning to get a bit whiffy. I go downstairs and open the suitcase, take out my purchases, and carry them up to my room. I stash them in the wardrobe, but there's enough space for ten times as much stuff, which leaves me puzzled. But I don't feel like trying the new costumes on right now. In fact, I feel like shit. Sam is ignoring me pointedly (a defensive reaction, I think), we're living in a crazy experiment that doesn't make sense, and I won't even get a chance to find out if everyone else thinks it's mad until the day after tomorrow.
I'm reading the tablet's explanation of how vocations—excuse me, "work"—worked in dark ages society, boggling slightly, when a bell rings from the low table next to my bed. I look toward it and my tablet flashes: ANSWER THE PHONE.
Oh. I didn't realize I had one. I fumble around for a while then find the chunky gadget on a cord that you're supposed to hold to your face. "Yes?" I say.
"R-Reeve! Is that you?"
"Cass? Kay?" I ask, blanking on names for a moment.
"Reeve! You've got to help me get out of here! He's crazy. If I stay here, I'm sure he's going to end up hitting me again. I need somewhere to go." I've heard panic before, and this is it. Cass (Kay? a little corner of me insists) is desperate. But why?
"Where are you?" I ask. "What's happening? Calm down and tell me everything."
"I need to get away from here," she insists again, her voice breaking. "He's crazy! He's read the manuals and he's insisting he's going to get the completion bonus, and if he has to, he's going to force me to do everything by the book. He went out this morning, locking me in and taking my wallet—he's still got it—and when he got back, he threatened to beat me up if I didn't prepare a meal for him. He says that for maximum points the female must obey the male, and if I don't do what the guidelines say, he'll beat me up—shit, he's coming."
Click.
I'm left holding the receiver, staring at the wall behind the bed in horror. I drop it and rush downstairs to the living room. "Sam! We've got to do something!"
Sam looks up from his tablet. "Do what?"
"It's K—Cass! She just phoned. She needs help. Her husband is crazy—he's taken away her wallet, locked her indoors, and is threatening to beat her up if she doesn't obey him. We've got to do something! There's no way she can defend herself—"
Sam puts his tablet down. "Are you sure of this?" he asks quietly.
"Yes! That's what she told me!" I'm just about jumping up and down, beside myself with fury. (If I ever catch the joker who leeched all my upper body strength, I swear I am going to graft their head to a tree sloth and make them run an endurance race.) "We've got to do something!"
"Like what?" he asks.
I deflate. "I'm not sure. She wants to get out. But—"
"Did you check our cumulative score?"
"My—no, I didn't. What's that got to do with it?"
"Just do it," he says.
"Okay." What is our cohort's cumulative score? I ask my netlink. The result sets me back. "Hey, we're doing well! Even after . . ." I falter.
"Well yes, if you look in the subtotals, you'll see that we get points, lots of them, for forming ‘stable normative relationships.' " His cheek twitches. "Like Cass and, who is it, Mick."
"But if he's hurting her—"
"Is he really? All right, we take her word for it. But what can we do? If we break them up, we cost everyone in our cohort a hundred points, just like that. Reeve, have you noticed the journal log? Infractions are public. Everyone noticed your little—experiment—at lunchtime. It's all over their journal, in red digits. Caused quite a stir. If you do something that costs the cohort a stable relationship, some of them—not me, but the ones who will be obsessing with that termination bonus—will start to hate you. And as you pointed out earlier, we're stuck here for the next hundred megs."
"Shit. Shit!" I stare at him. "What about you?"
He looks up at me from his corner of the sofa, his face impassive. "What about me?"
"Would you hate me?" I ask, quietly.
He thinks for a moment. "No. No, I don't think so." Pause. "I wish you'd be a little more discreet, though. Lie low, think things through before you act, try to at least look as if you're planning on fitting in."
"Okay. So what should I be thinking? About Cass, I mean. If that scumbag is taking advantage of his greater physical strength . . ."
"Reeve." He pauses again. "I agree in principle. But first we must know what we need to do. Can she leave him of her own accord, without our help? If so, then she ought to—it's her choice. If not, what can we do to help? We have to live with the consequences of our early mistakes for a very long time. Unless Cass is in immediate danger, it would be best to try and get the entire cohort to take action, not go it alone."
"But right now, we've got to stop him doing anything. Haven't we?"
I don't know what's come over me. I feel helpless, and I hate it. I should be able to go round to the scumsucker's house and kick the door down and give him a taste of cold steel in his guts. Or failing that, I ought to plan a cunning two-pronged assault that whisks the victim to safety while booby-trapping his bathroom and putting itching powder in his bed. But I'm just spinning my wheels, venting and emoting and unloading on Sam. My normal network of resources and capabilities is missing, and I'm letting the environment dictate my responses. The environment is set up to inculcate this weird gender-deterministic role play, so I'm . . . I shake my head.
"We don't want anyone to get the idea that hurting or imprisoning members of our cohort is a good way to earn points," Sam says thoughtfully. "Do you have any ideas about how to do that?"
I think for a moment. "Phone him," I say, before the idea is completely formed in my head. "Phone him and . . . yeah." I look out at the garden. "Tell him we'll see him, and Cass, at Church, the day after tomorrow. There's no need to be nasty," I realize. "It says we're supposed to dress up and look good in Church. It's a custom thing. Tell him we could lose points if she doesn't look good. Collectively." I turn to Sam. "Think he'll get the message?"
"Unless he's very, very stupid." Sam nods, then stands up. "I'll call him right away." He pauses. "Reeve?"
"Yes?"
"You're not . . . you're making me nervous, smiling like that."
"Sorry." I think for a moment. "Sam?"
"Yes?"
I'm silent for a few second while I try to work out how much I can safely tell him. After a while I shrug mentally and just say it. I don't think Sam is likely to be a cold-blooded assassin in the pay of whatever enemies my earlier self made. "I knew Cass. Outside the experiment before we, uh, before we volunteered. If that turd-faced scum hurts her I—well, right now I can't punch his teeth so far down his throat that he has to eat with his ass, but I'll think of something else to do. Something equivalent. And, Sam?"
"Yes?"
"I can be very creative when it's time to get violent."