Chapter 4

Although I was left to my own devices, I could never be bored. Once you have the Interface installed there are always things to do. I had been given a basic tutorial which meant I knew how to unlock doors, go to the bathroom, switch on lights and, more importantly, look up how to do other things. There was an endless amount of education that was available for free and a bewildering amount of stuff that you had to pay for.

Right then, though, I was more concerned with working out my feeling about gender. Not something that had concerned me too much before. I had found a secret stash of girl clothes that Karl, my son, had been hiding. Fortunately, he was at school at the time, so I had time to do a bit of research and get my head around it. In the end, I washed and ironed them and left them on his bed with a note just saying that I loved him unconditionally with unconditionally underlined. I visited a psychologist just to ask his advice, but he told me to just wait for Karl to approach me and he never did.

I don't think my son was transgender although I did read about it. My reaction to thinking that I had lost my manhood made me realise that I associated my male gender very much with having one. I understood from my research that gender was not dependent on any body parts. If a man has an accident and loses those parts that doesn't make him less of a man and a woman who has had a hysterectomy is no less of a woman. Gender is all in the brain. You are who you think you are. That was my conclusion anyway.

I remember hearing that pink, that is so associated with femininity now, used to be the colour that young boys would wear as a watered down version of a soldiers red tunic. Likewise, Roman legionaries wore the equivalent of a leather skirt and Scotsmen still wear kilts that have all the appearance of a skirt even if there are some subtle differences. What you wear does not define you or your gender.

The only way I was going to survive this experience with my sanity intact was to keep these ideas in mind and ignore as much of my cultural conditioning as I could. I was going to be conditioned with an entirely new culture, after all.

With all that in mind, I started delving into my interface. Clearly, others could program certain effects into my mind so I looked up what was allowed. While I was in the care of the hospital any qualified doctor could take control of my interface. Outside of the hospital, only my matriarch could cause the pain that was called Crush and only someone I had accepted as my lover could access the intimate functions of my interface. Having said that my matriarch could influence my two prescribed releases. She could cancel them altogether, reduce the pleasure or increase it.

Crush is only supposed to be used in extreme cases and the most it can be set for is an hour. It has a knock on effect that any releases after it would be painful rather than pleasurable for a few days. My matriarch was going to be the woman who ran the boarding house I would be assigned to. Matriarch is the best translation I can come up with. A normal household contains two or three women and one man, often with only one child permitted. In order for that to work, someone needs to be in charge and that person is called the matriarch. Once two women decide to be together and form the start of a family group, they have to decide on who is going to be the matriarch and at that point, their previous matriarch, usually their mothers, lose any authority over them.

When males reach majority, which is 25 on Arrat, they have the option of leaving their family to go and live in a boarding house. Men have very little control in their lives but they always have the option of leaving which is supposed to prevent abuse. Of course, if they have a child, which they do most of the looking after, the idea of leaving that child behind, makes leaving very unlikely.

Leaving a relationship or your original family to go to a boarding house was a big step, but there was no fall back position from there. You got out of the boarding house by moving in with a woman. In theory, because there was a scarcity of men, finding someone to move in with was not supposed to be difficult.

If my matriarch was able to influence my interface, I wanted to know what she was able to do and how much privacy I would have. The answer was more privacy than I expected. My matriarch could access my interface at any point, but I would know when she was doing so. She couldn't look at what I had been doing before she turned her attention to me, only what was present when she looked. It was considered rude to do so if the subject was an adult.

The interface can record any and all the senses but it only does so when you make it. Most men my age would have a library of recordings and I was supposed to have nothing. However, occasionally, the interface reacts differently to different people and in my case, I now had an auditory memory of everything that I had heard throughout my life from the age of about seven. So every song I had heard, every piece of music heard or played was available to me. None of it was organised though, so over the next few weeks, when I had spare time, I would go through my memories and separate out each song or music and arrange it in folders for easy access.

My greatest discovery was illusionary musical instruments. The interface could project non-existing objects as if they were real and have my body respond to them as if they were too. I couldn't sit on an illusionary chair, but I could create a piano or guitar and play it as if it was real. I could feel the strings, the wood and hear the notes. No one else could either see the guitar or hear the notes unless I used a particular setting on the interface. I had to play around with it to get the right sound to come out of it, but the idea that I would forever have a guitar available to me was such a joy.

I was brought dinner by a nurse and remembering the threat that had been issued, I ate as much as I could.

In the evening I had to work out the clothing situation and lack of sheets or blankets. Your clothing and bedding interacts with your interface. Pretty much everything is designed to interact with you. You remove your clothes by asking it to go to default. I needed to do that to have a shower. The shower is also controlled by the interface. In the bathroom, there is this vase looking gismo with a wide neck that takes the black disk that your clothes turn into and cleans it in about thirty seconds. I had to put it back on and choose from various night garments.

The bed has various options and produced a sheet when I asked for one. I kept an eye on the time, knowing at 10 pm I was going to get my prescribed release and because I had experienced Crush that day, it was not going to be pleasant. The doctor, as heartless as I found her, was nice enough to cancel my prescribed releases so I worried over nothing. The time came and went with no effect. It did make me search my interface to see how I could know in the future if my matriarch had fiddled with my options. Once you got the hang of it the interface was fairly self-explanatory and easy to navigate.

I slept well, had another shower in the morning, changed my clothes back to the skirt and top, and then kept myself occupied working on my music. My long hair was interesting. I had never had long hair before and was expecting it to be difficult to deal with, but I think they did something with the Regen to make it easy to manage. I brushed it out and it seemed to look good to my inexpert eye.

The doctor came round, passed her instrument over me again and pronounced me fit and healthy. Ten minutes later a nurse led me to the front door. Their technology is so far in advance to ours that I was expecting hover cars, at the very least. Instead, a car-like vehicle approached. It had three rows of two seats, no driver and no obvious engine, but it was on tyres. I had to use my interface to get the door open, but the destination was already programmed in, so when the door closed, we started moving.

It did feel weird, travelling on my own in a car without a driver or any obvious way of steering. Around me were mainly high rise towers. There were intersections but no light system and all cars seemed to go at the same time, missing each other by what seemed like inches.

My destination appeared to be another high rise. The vehicle went down a ramp and stopped outside a set of doors. I opened the car door, stepped out and closed the door. Immediately, the vehicle pulled away. With no other obvious options, I entered the door to the building in front of me.