"I still want you," I tell him. Although a worm of doubt adds, "I'm just not sure I want you for the same reasons I wanted you last week."
"They've gotten to you."
I laugh shakily. "They got to me a long time ago. I just didn't notice until now." I clutch at him, but as much from terror as lust. "Why are you here, Kay? Why did you sign up for the experiment?"
"I followed you."
"Bullshit!" I can see it now. "That's not enough. And don't tell me it was to get away from your time with the ice ghouls. Why did you go there? What were you running away from?"
Sam is silent and unresponsive for a while. "If I tell you, you'll probably hate me."
"So?" I see an opportunity. Shuffling up onto the bed I pull my legs up under my dress and sit cross-legged with my hands in my lap. "If I listen to your story and I don't hate you afterward, will you let me fuck you?"
"I don't see what that's got to do with"
"Let me be the judge of my motives, Sam." Even if they're contaminated. "You keep trying to second-guess me. It's getting to be a bad habit. Before, I didn't want to sleep with you for reasons that made sense at the time. Then when the reasons no longer apply, you say I'macting out of character. You don't give me credit for being able to change of my own volition."
He shakes his head.
"Have you any idea how insulting that is?"
"That's not what I meant"
"I am capable of change, that's why I'm here!" I draw a deep breath. "I'm not who I was during the war, Sam, or before it, or even after it. I'm who I am now, which is the end product of all those other people becoming one another. They can put you into the dark ages, but they can't put the dark ages into you, not short of truncating your life expectancy to about three gigasecs or erasing so many memories you might as well be..." I trail off. I've got a strange feeling that I just realized something vitally important, but I'm not sure what.
He looks at me oddly. "You'll hate me," he says. "I did terrible things."
"So?" I shrug. "I did bad things, too. People out there wanted to kill me, Sam. I thought it was something to do with a mission I was on and had accidentally erased, but now I'm not so sure; maybe they were just after me because of, well, one of the people I used to be. A person who fought in the war. A combatant."
He rocks back and forth thoughtfully. "Nobody here but us war criminals," he says.
It is very interesting to discover that the phrase "my blood runs cold" actually reflects a physical sensation. It is much less pleasant to do so while sitting next to someone you love unconditionally and currently can't share a room with without needing a change of underwear, and who's just triggered that sensation in your head. And it's even worse when you realize that what he said applies to you, too. "Nobody here but us monsters," I say, trying to be flippant. "Or amnesiacs haunted by the ghosts of their past lives."
"Has it occurred to you that YFH-Polity might be very convenient for a certain type of person?" Sam asks slowly.
I'm getting impatient. "Are you going to lay me down on this bed and have sex with me after you finish lecturing me to death?"
He turns a funny color. "If we both still want to."
If we both still want to. Well, I guess you just have to work with what you've got. "I'm all ears," I say.
He shudders. "Don't say that."
"Well it's"not literally "true. Sort of."
"Where were you when the war broke out?" he asks.
Oops. I didn't expect him to ask that. Revealing that kind of thing would be a big no-no under normal circumstancesa breach of operational security that could allow an opponent to work out exactly who you are and thereby figure out all sorts of useful things about you, enough to endanger you operationally, because virtually everything you ever did in public is stored in a database somewhere. Butwe're in the guts of a MASucker, and if I'm not mistaken, there's only one data channel in or out, and Sam isn't part of the cabal, and I reckon the current risk of our being eavesdropped on is low. Nor are these normal circumstances.
"I was aboard a MASucker, interviewing the crew," I admit. "We were cut off for more than a gig after the net went down." Sam makes a thoughtful noise. "Your turn," I prompt, trying to change the subject.
"I was an auditor." Sam is silent again. "That's why they drafted me."
"They?"
"The Solipsist Nation: Third Unforgivable Thoughtcrime Battalion, to be precise. They were doing a search and sweep for unsecured memory temples through the disconnected segment I was stranded in, less than a hundred kilosecs after Curious Yellow cut loose. I'd already been censored and compromised, and they just grabbed me and added me to their distributed denial of consciousness array. I spent the next couple of megs scrambling graveyards beyond retrieval, then they got around to actually in-processing me and assigned me to erasing archive trails."
Ugh. And I thought what I did in the Linebarger Cats was ugly? I must shiver or give some other cue because Sam pulls away from me slightly. "What clades did the Solipsist Nation align with?" I ask, trying to distract him.
"What clades?" He shakes his head. "It was us against everyone, Reeve. You think anybody in their right minds would ally themselves with an aggressively solipsistic borganism?"
"But you"I force myself to lean closer as I ask; he's tense and unhappy"you were just a component, weren't you?"
He shakes his head. "I had some degree of autonomy, by the time the war ended the Nation had taken to investing us with a modicum of free will. I was... well. Before the war, I looked pretty much the way you do right now. The Nation upgraded me, turned me into a combat ogreand put me on occupation duty. You know what they called us? Rape machines. If you want to break someone's will to resist, you can go via the brain, but if the netlink's been fried by EMP, you have to get physical. They gave us penises with backward-facing spines, you know that? We did... terrible things. Eventually we were overrunmy segment was overrunby a consortium of enemies, and they offlined us and when I woke up I was back to being me again, but a me with memories and a large chunk of the Nation wedged in my head. I spent half a meg in my cell disbelieving in the walls and floor before I realized that they had to exist for the same reason I had to exist. And while I was part of the Nation I did things." Deep breath. "Things that left me ashamed to be human. Or male."
"Yeah, but." I stall. "You weren't yourself. Right?"
"I wish I could believe that." He sounds forlorn. "I wouldn't do that kind of thing now, but thenI remember believing in what I was doing. That was part of why I did the ice ghoul thing, I didn't want to be part of a species that could dream something like the Solipsist Nation into existence. I wantedwe wantedto think every thought in the human phase-space. Do you know what it's like to be hungry and always eating and never full? Solipsist Nation wrecked memory temples out of spite because they contained thoughts we hadn't originated. And I contributed to that. I enthusiastically optimized the processes. I did it because I wanted to." He takes a deep breath. "I killed people, Reeve. I killed people permanently."
"Then we're not so different."
"You?" He stares. "But you said you'd..."
"I started the war on a MASucker; I didn't stay there." I take a deep breath, because I don't think I can dodge this one. "I volunteered. Joined the Linebarger Cats, combat operations. Spent nearly a gigasec being an armored regiment. Ended up in Psyops."
"Well." His voice is shaky. "I didn't expect that ."
"What proportion of the people here do you think fought in the wars?"
"I haven't thought about it."
"People who were there don't want to remember it. Almost as soon as we'd got a local cease-fire established, people were slinking off to the surgeon-confessors."