Free Glasshouse by Charles Stross Page A

out. He seems mildly annoyed, probably because people aren’t hanging on his every word. Me, I’m fascinated—but I used to be an historian, too, albeit studying a very different area.
    â€œWill you let me continue?” Fiore asks pointedly, glaring at a female in the row behind me.
    â€œOnly if you tell us what this has got to do with us,” she says cheekily.
    â€œI’ll—” Fiore stops. Again, he takes a deep breath and throws his shoulders back. “You’re going to be living in the dark ages, in a simulated Euromerican cultura like those that existed in the period 1950–2040,” he snaps. “I’m trying to tell you that this is our best reconstruction of the environment from available sources. This is a sociological and psychological immersion experiment, which means we’ll be watching how you interact with each other. You get points for staying in character, which means obeying the society’s ground rules, and you lose points for breaking role.” I sit up. “Your individual score affects the group, which means everyone. Your cohort—all ten of you, one of the twenty groups we’re introducing to this section of the polity over the next five megs—will meet once a week, on Sundays, in a parish center called the Church of the Nazarene, where you can discuss whatever you’ve learned. To make the simulation work better, there are a lot of nonplayer characters, zombies run by the Gamesmaster, and formuch of the time you’ll be interacting with these rather than with other experimental subjects. Everything’s laid out in a collection of hab segments linked by gates so they feel like a single geographical continuum, just like a traditional planetary surface.”
    He calms down a little. “Questions?”
    â€œWhat are the society’s ground rules?” asks a male with dark skin in a light suit from the back row. He sounds puzzled.
    â€œYou’ll find out. They’re largely imposed through environmental constraints. If you need to be told, we’ll tell you via your netlink or one of the zombies.” Fiore sounds even more smug.
    â€œWhat are we meant to do here?” asks the redhead in the seat beside me. She sounds alert if a little vague. “I mean, apart from ‘obey the rules.’ A hundred megs is a long time, isn’t it?”
    â€œObey the rules.” Fiore smiles tightly. “The society you’re going to be living in was formal and highly ritualized, with much attention paid to individual relationships and status often determined by random genetic chance. The core element in this society is something called the nuclear family. It’s a heteromorphic structure based on a male and a female living in close quarters, usually with one of them engaging in semi-ritualized labor to raise currency and the other preoccupied with social and domestic chores and child rearing. You’re expected to fit in, although child rearing is obviously optional. We’re interested in studying the stability of such relationships. You’ll find your tablets contain copies of several books that survived the dark ages.”
    â€œOkay, so we form these, uh, nuclear families,” calls a female from the back row. “What else do we need to know?”
    Fiore shrugs. “Nothing now. Except”—a thought strikes him—“you’ll be living with dark ages medical constraints. Remember that! An accident can kill you. Worse, it can leave you damaged: You won’t have access to assemblers during the experiment. You really don’t want to try modifying your bodies, either; the medical technology that exists is quite authentically primitive. Nor will you have access to your netlinks from now on.” I try to probe mine, but there’s nothing there. For a panicky moment I wonder if I’ve gone deaf, then I realize, He’s telling the truth! There’s no network