Free Glasshouse by Charles Stross Page B

here. “Your netlinks will communicate socialscoring metrics to you, and nothing else. There is a primitive conversational internetwork between wired terminals here, but you aren’t expected to use it.
    â€œWe’ve laid on a buffet outside this room. I suggest you get to know each other, then each pick a partner and go through that door”—he points to a door at the other side of the white wall—“which will gate you to your primary residence for in-processing. Remember to take your slates so you can read the quickstart guide to dark ages society.” He looks around the room briefly. “If there are no more questions, I’ll be going.”
    A hand or two goes up at the back, but before anyone can call out, he turns and dives through the door he came in. I look at Redhead.
    â€œHuh, I guess that’s us told,” she says. “What now?”
    I glance at Big Guy. “What do you think?”
    He stands up. “I think we ought to do like he said and eat,” he says slowly. “And talk. I’m Sam. What are you called?”
    â€œI’m R-Reeve,” I say, stumbling over the name the tablet said I should use. “And you,” I add glancing at redhead, “are . . . ?”
    â€œYou can call me Alice.” She stands up. “Come on. Let’s see who else is here and get to know them.”
    OUTSIDE the lecture theatre there are two long tables heaped with plates of cold finger food, fruit and “cheese”—strong-smelling curds fermented from something I can’t identify—and glasses of wine. Five of us are male and five of us are female, and we partition into two loose clumps at either table, at opposite sides of the room. Besides Alice the redhead there’s Angel (dark skin and frizzy hair), Jen (roundish face, pale blond hair, even curvier than I am), and Cass (straight black hair, coffee-colored skin, serious eyes). We’re all looking a little uncomfortable, moving in jerks and tics, twitchy in our new bodies and ugly clothes. The males are Sam (whom I met), Chris (the dark-skinned male from the back row), El, Fer, and Mick. I try to tell them apart by the color of their suits and neckcloths, but it’s hard work, and the short hair gives them all a mechanical, almost insectile, similarity. It must have been a very conformist age, I think.
    â€œSo.” Alice looks round at our little group and smiles, then picks a cube of yellowish ‘cheese’ from her woodpulp plate and chews it thoughtfully. “What are we going to do?”
    Angel produces her tablet from a little bag that she hangs over her arm. If I had one, I didn’t notice it, and I kick myself mentally for not thinking of improvising something like that. “There’s a reading list here,” she says, carefully tapping through it. I watch over her shoulder as scrolls dissolve into facsimile pages from ancient manuscripts. “There’s that odd word again. What’s a ‘wife’?”
    â€œI think I know that one,” says Cass. “The, uh, family thing. Where there were only two participants, and they were morphologically locked, the female participant was called a ‘wife’ and the male was called a ‘husband.’ It implies sexual relations, if it’s anything like ice ghoul society.”
    â€œWe aren’t supposed to talk about the outside,” Jen says uncomfortably.
    â€œBut if we don’t, we don’t have any points of reference for what we’re trying to understand and live in, do we?” I say, fighting the urge to stare at Cass. Is that you in there, Kay? It might just be a coincidence, her knowing something about ice ghouls—there was a huge fad for them about two gigasecs ago, when they were first discovered. Then again, the bad guys might have noticed Kay and sent a headhunter after me, armed with whatever they can extract from her skull for