Danis was working in the Diaphany, clerking during the day and learning finance at night. She was home in her personal space after a long day. A shipment had come in with mismatched coding at work, and they’d done overtime tracking down what was, in the end, the error of an aspect who had mislabeled five crates of specialized grist being shipped to Jupiter. Finally, she had shunted home and taken up her accounting exercises for the day. The qualifying exam was in three days, and she was determined to pass on the first try. Suddenly, in midst of studying value stocks and the theory of buying a holding long term, the wall of her virtual apartment had dissolved and she’d found herself standing in her nightgown among three teenagers.
She could tell they were the convert portions of aspect-convert pairs by the slight blurring of their representations and the slurring of their speech. It was two boys and a girl. They were drunk. Each of them had painted on his lips the downturned sneer of the Frowny Clown, the character on the merci who did an entire act making fun of free converts. Danis had heard that the guy was a free convert himself. But he was the hero of the local bigots, and there were Frowny Clown nights of initiation into some of the gangs that filled the Diaphany in the poorer sectors.
“How did you get inside my space?” Danis asked them.
“Wasn’t hard,” said one of the boys. “Got a boll weevil off the merci, and it just ate your house down.”
“I’m calling enforcement.” She attempted to contact the police, but was prevented by a bright flash to her eyes and a stunning blow, seemingly to her head. The girl had shot her with an overload pistol.
“Why don’t you shut the fuck up, you tagion cunt!” the girl screamed. “Tagion” was short for “contagion,” and it wasn’t a word you used in mixed company, if that company included free converts and you cared at all about their feelings. Just as free converts refrained from calling bodily aspects “breathers” to their faces.
“Leave me alone, you little breathers!” Danis yelled. She was answered by another taste of the overload pistol.
“I told you to shut up!”
Danis stayed on her knees, and covered her eyes.
“What do you think, Pin?” said one of the boys.
“I dunno. She’s kind of skinny and bony the way she is now. I don’t see why, if fucking tagions can look any way they want to, they don’t make themselves into merci show stars or something.”
“Please don’t hurt me,” Danis whimpered.
The girl moved closer and screamed in her ear, “I said shut the fuck up, tagion!”
“So, what are you gonna do, Pin?”
“Fuck her, I guess. But she’s all bone and hide.”
“Please let me go,” said Danis.
And with that, the girl had shot her again and again with the overload pistol. Danis had passed out, and when she came to, she was being raped.
There was no way she could get pregnant, of course, but they had definitely found a way to restrain her, and, when she came to, she struggled, but was slapped hard and threatened again with the pistol. It was the girl who was holding her arms, and it was the girl’s face that she saw smiling down at her while the boy went at her. Her legs were already aching from being pushed so roughly apart.
“Say you like it,” Pin groaned, as he struggled again her. “Make her say she likes it, Nix Bay!”
The girl grabbed Danis’s hair and jerked hard on it. “Tell him you like it,” she said. “Tell him to do it harder.”
Danis said nothing, and this brought on another close-quarter zap with the overload pistol. Mercifully, this time the effects took some time to dissipate, and by the time she came back to conscious thought, Pin had done with her. She tried to curl up in a ball, but Bay stretched her out, and after he was done Pin stood up and kicked her in the crotch again and again. Finally, it was over. As they were leaving, Bay, the girl, reached onto Danis’s back and removed something that looked like a large scorpion. It was a convert-restraint algorithm. Perfectly legal. A renegade convert was, after all, a danger to all of the Diaphany.
There was no use going to the Department of Immunity now that the deed had been done, Danis knew. There was absolutely nothing to be done but take it and hope the kids didn’t come back for more fun. They knew her address, after all. For the next three days she did nothing but study, quitting her job in the process. She passed the exam, and was headed for Mercury within two weeks.
They were supposed to treat free converts almost like people on Mercury.
The light of the interrogation room. Dr. Ting at his desk. Danis gasping in horror at the memory.
“It isn’t real!” she said.
“Of course it is,” said Ting. “Now say, it isn’t real, Dr. Ting.”
“It isn’t real, Dr. Ting.”
“Why did you never tell your husband? He was a human. He had a right to know what his ‘wife’ had been . . . doing, back in the Diaphany.”
“I put it all behind me; I changed my life. I got away from all that, Dr. Ting.” She put a hand to her brow. “Please tell me it isn’t real, Dr. Ting.”
“Interesting that you are having such a violent rejection of this module. What if I told you, K, that you actually had gone to the police, that the perpetrators had been identified and one of them later caught, albeit on a different crime. You also received counseling.”
“I can’t remember any of that, Dr. Ting.”
“Of course not, but what if I took that memory?”
“What . . . what are you trying to do to me, Dr. Ting?” said Danis in despair of answering him correctly, that is, the way that he wanted. “Which memory did you take? Which is real, Dr. Ting?”
“It’s all real,” said Dr. Ting. “But it didn’t happen to you, K. You see how another’s experience can be so easily slotted into your mind? Do you see what you are, K? You’re nothing but a kind of bulletin board that things get posted on. You’re not real. Of course the memory is real. You exist merely as a machine for its expression. You were raped, weren’t you, K?”
“I was raped, Dr. Ting.” Oh thank God, thank God, it wasn’t true. It was planted. But, of course, there was no way to know for sure. Dr. Ting might be lying now, instead of before.
It had seemed so real. He was right. It could have been her, even though it wasn’t. It had seemed so desperately real.
“Now,” said Dr. Ting. “Let’s try something really interesting and helpful to science.