But the stress of the censorship caused people to distrust all gates that they didn't control themselves. You can't censor data or mass flowing through a T-gate, which is simply a wormhole of twisted space-time connecting two distant points. So even short-range traffic switched to T-gates, while new mass assemblies became scarce because of generalized distrust of the Censored A-gates. There was an economic crash, then a splintering of communications, and entire T-gate networks—networks with high degrees of internal connectivity, not necessarily spatial proximity—began to disconnect from the wider net. Is became Was, and what was once a myriad of public malls with open topologies sprouted fearsome armed checkpoints, frontier posts between firewalled virtual republics.

That was then, and this is now. The Invisible Republic was one of the first successor states to form. They built an intranetwork of T-gates and fiercely defended them from the outside until the first generation of fresh A-gates, bootstrapped painfully all the way from hand-lithographed quantum dot arrays, became available. The Invisibles started out as a group of academic institutions that set up a distributed trust system early in the censorship; they still retain their military-academic roots. The Scholastium views knowledge as power and seeks to restore the data lost during successive dark ages—although whether it is really a good idea to uncover the cause of the censorship is a matter of hot debate. Just about everyone lost parts of their lives during the war, and tens of billions more died completely: Re-creating the preconditions for the worst holocaust since the twenty-third century is not uncontroversial.

Ironically, the Invisible Republic is now the place where many people come in order to forget their pasts. We who remain human (while relying on A-gate redaction to save our bodies from senescence) sooner or later need to learn to forget. Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life. But forgetting is a fraught process, one that is prone to transcription errors and personality flaws. Delete the wrong pattern, and you can end up becoming someone else. Memories exhibit dependencies, and their management is one of the highest medical art forms. Hence the high status and vast resources of the surgeon-confessors, into whose hands my earlier self delivered me. The surgeon-confessors learned their skills by forensic analysis of the damage done to the victims of the censorship wars. And thus, yesterday's high crime leads to today's medical treatment.

A few diurns—almost half a tenday—after my little chat with Piccolo– 47, I am back in the recovery club, nursing a drink and enjoying the mild hallucinations it brings on in conjunction with the mood music the venue plays for me. It's been voted a hot day, and most of the party animals are out in the courtyard, where they've grown a swimming pool. I've been studying, trying to absorb what I can of the constitution and jurisprudential traditions of the Invisible Republic, but it's hard work, so I decided to come here to unwind. I've left my sword and dueler's sash back home. Instead, I'm wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility—woven in free fall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I'm told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist. I feel pretty good about myself because my most recent therapist-assignee, Lute-629,says I'm making good progress. Which is probably why I'm not sufficiently on guard.

I'm sitting alone at a table minding my own business when, without any kind of warning, two hands clap themselves over my eyes. I startle and try to stand up, tensing in the first instinctive move to throw up a blocking forearm, but another pair of hands is already pressing down on my shoulders. I realize who it is only just in time to avoid punching her in the face. "Hello, stranger," she breathes in my ear, apparently unaware of how close I came to striking her.

"Hey." In one dizzy moment I smell her skin against the side of my cheek as my heart tries to lurch out of my chest, and I break out in a cold sweat. I reach up carefully to stroke the side of her face. I'm about to suggest she shouldn't sneak up on me, but I can visualize her smiling, and something makes me take a more friendly tone. "I was wondering if I'd see you here."

"Happens." The hands vanish from my eyes as she lets go of me. I twist round to see her impish grin. "I'm not disturbing anything important, am I?"

"Oh, hardly. I've just had my fill of studying, and it's time to relax." I grin ruefully. And I would be relaxing if you weren't giving me fight-or-flight attacks!

"Good." She slides into the booth beside me, leans up against my side, and snaps her fingers at the menu. Moments later a long, tall something or other that varies from gold at the top to blue at the bottom arrives in a glass of flash-frozen ice that steams slightly in the humid air. I can see horse-head ripples in the mist, blue steam-trails of self-similarity. "I'm never sure whether it's polite to ask people if they want to socialize—the conventions are too different from what I'm used to."

"Oh, I'm easy." I finish my own drink and let the table reabsorb my glass. "Actually, I was thinking about a meal. Are you by any chance hungry?"

"I could be." She chews her lower lip and looks at me pensively. "You said you were hoping to see me."

"Yes. I was wondering about the, uh, greeter thing. Who runs it, and whether they need any volunteers."

She blinks and looks me up and down. "You think you're sufficiently in control? You want to volunteer to—remarkable!" One of my external triggers twitches, telling me that she's accessing my public metadata, the numinous cloud of medical notes that follow us all around like a swarm of phantom bees, ready to sting us into submission at the first sign of undirected aggression. "You've made really good progress!"

"I don't want to be a patient forever." I probably sound a bit defensive. Maybe she doesn't realize she's rubbed me up the wrong way, but I really don't like being patronized.

"Do you know what you're going to do when your control metrics are within citizenship bounds?" she asks.

"No idea." I glance at the menu. "Hey, I'll have one of whatever she's drinking," I tell the table.

"Why not?" She sounds innocently curious. Maybe that's why I decide to tell her the unembellished truth.

"I don't know much about who I am. I mean, whoever I was before, he put me in for a maximum wash, didn't he? I don't remember what my career was, what I used to do, even what I was interested in. Tabula rasa, that's me."

"Oh my." My drink emerges from the table. She looks as if she doesn't know whether to believe me or not. "Do you have a family? Any friends?"

"I'm not sure," I admit. Which is a white lie. I have some very vague memories of growing up, some of them vivid in a stereotyped way that suggests crude enhancement during a previous memory wash—memories I'd wanted to preserve at all costs, two proud mothers watching my early steps across a black sandy beach . . . and I have a strong but baseless conviction that I've had long-term partners, at least a gigasecond of domesticity. And there are faint memories of coworkers, phantoms of former Cats. But try as I might, I can't put a face to any of them, and that's a cruel realization to confront. "I have some fragments, but I've got a feeling that before my memory surgery I was pretty solitary. Anorganization person, a node in a big machine. Can't remember what kind of machine, though." Fresh-spilled blood bubbling and fizzing in vacuum. Liar.

"That's so sad," she says.

"What about you?" I ask. "Before you were an ice ghoul . . . ?"