gistfile1.txt

Manfred wonders, his head turgid and unnaturally slow. It's like being drunk, except much less pleasant: He can't seem to wrap his head around an idea from all angles at once, anymore. Is this what consciousness used to be like? It's an ugly, slow sensation. She turns away from him: "Medline says you'll be all right in a while. The main problem is the identity loss. Are you backed up anywhere?"

"Here." Alan, still top-hatted and mutton-chopped, holds out a pair of spectacles to Manfred. "Take these, they may do you some good." His topper wobbles, as if a strange A-life experiment is nesting under its brim.

"Oh. Thank you." Manfred reaches for them with a pathetic sense of gratitude. As soon as he puts them on, they run through a test series, whispering questions and watching how his eyes focus: After a minute, the room around him clears as the specs build a synthetic image to compensate for his myopia. There's limited Net access, too, he notices, a warm sense of relief stealing over him. "Do you mind if I call somebody?" he asks: "I want to check my back-ups."

"Be my guest." Alan slips out through the door; Monica sits down opposite him and stares into some inner space. The room has a tall ceiling, with whitewashed walls and wooden shutters to cover the aerogel window bays. The furniture is modern modular, and clashes horribly with the original nineteenth-century architecture. "We were expecting you."

"You were –" He shifts track with an effort: "I was here to see somebody. Here in Scotland, I mean."

"Us." She catches his eye deliberately. "To discuss sapience options with our patron."

"With your –" He squeezes his eyes shut. "Damn! I don't remember. I need my glasses back. Please."

"What about your back-ups?" she asks curiously.

"A moment." Manfred tries to remember what address to ping. It's useless, and painfully frustrating. "It would help if I could remember where I keep the rest of my mind," he complains. "It used to be at – oh, there."

An elephantine semantic network sits down on his spectacles as soon as he asks for the site, crushing his surroundings into blocky pixilated monochrome that jerks as he looks around. "This is going to take some time," he warns his hosts as a goodly chunk of his metacortex tries to handshake with his brain over a wireless network connection that was really only designed for web browsing. The download consists of the part of his consciousness that isn't security-critical – public access actors and vague opinionated rants – but it clears down a huge memory castle, sketching in the outline of a map of miracles and wonders onto the whitewashed walls of the room.

When Manfred can see the outside world again, he feels a bit more like himself: He can, at least, spawn a search thread that will resynchronize and fill him in on what it found. He still can't access the inner mysteries of his soul (including his personal memories); they're locked and barred pending biometric verification of his identity and a quantum key exchange. But he has his wits about him again – and some of them are even working. It's like sobering up from a strange new drug, the infinitely reassuring sense of being back at the controls of his own head. "I think I need to report a crime," he tells Monica – or whoever is plugged into Monica's head right now, because now he knows where he is and who he was meant to meet (although not why) – and he understands that, for the Franklin Collective, identity is a politically loaded issue.