It interrogated the two cores. PAST, the first was labelled. The other one was simply called 2/2.
Uh-huh, it thought.
It opened the first core and found its memories.
II
Genar-Hofoen floated within the shower, buffeted from all sides by the streams of water. The fans sucking the water back out of the AG shower chamber sounded awfully loud this morning. Part of his brain told him he was running short of oxygen; he’d either have to leave the shower or grope for the air hose which was probably in the last place he’d feel for it. It was either that or open his eyes. It all seemed too much bother. He was quite comfortable where he was.
He waited to see what would give first.
It was his brain’s indifference to the fact he was suffocating. Suddenly he was wide awake and flailing around like some drowning basic-human, desperate for breath but afraid to breathe in the constellation of water globules he was floating within. His eyes were wide open. He saw the air hose and grabbed it. He breathed in. Shit it was bright. His eyes dimmed the view. That was better.
He felt he’d showered enough. He mumbled, “Off, off,” into the air hose mask a few times, but the water kept on coming. Then he remembered that the module wasn’t talking to him right now because he’d told the suit to accept no more communications last night. Obviously such irresponsibility had to be punished by the module being childish. He sighed.
Luckily the shower had an Off button. The water jets cut off. Gravity was fed gently back into the chamber and he floated slowly down with the settling blobs of water. A reverser field clicked on and he looked at himself in it while the last of the water drained away, sucking in his belly and sticking out his chin while he turned his face to the best angle and smoothed down a few upstart locks of his blond curls.
“Well, I may feel like shit but I still look great,” he announced to nobody in particular. For once, probably even the module wasn’t listening.
“Sorry to force the pace,” the representation of his uncle Tishlin said.
“’s all right,” he said through a mouthful of feyl steak. He washed it down with some warmed-over infusion the module had always assured him was beneficial when you hadn’t had enough sleep. It tasted disgusting enough to be either genuinely good for you, or just one of the module’s little jokes.
“Sleep okay?” his uncle’s image asked. He was, apparently, sitting across the table from Genar-Hofoen in the module’s dining room, a pleasantly airy space filled with porcelain and flowers and boasting a seemingly real-time view on three sides of a sunlit mountain valley, which in reality was half a galaxy away. A small serving drone hovered near the wall behind the man.
“Good two hours,” Genar-Hofoen said. He supposed he could have stayed awake the night before when he’d first discovered his uncle’s hologram waiting for him; he could have glanded something to keep him bright and awake and receptive and got all this over with then, but he’d known he’d end up paying for it eventually and besides, he wanted to show them that just because they’d gone to the trouble of persuading his favourite uncle to record a semantic-signal-mind-abstract-state or whatever the hell the module had called it, he still wasn’t going to jump just because they said so. The only concession he’d made to all the urgency was deliberately not to dream; he had a whole suite of pretty splendid dream-accessible scenarios going at the moment, several of them incorporating some powerfully good and satisfying sex, and it was a positive sacrifice to miss out on any of them.
So he’d gone to bed and had a pretty good if maybe still not quite long enough sleep and Uncle Tishlin’s message had just had to sit twiddling its abstract semantics in the module’s AI core, waiting till he got up.
So far all they’d done was exchange a few pleasantries and talk a little about old times; partly, of course, so that Genar-Hofoen could satisfy himself that this apparition had genuinely been sent by his uncle and SC had paid him the enormous compliment of sending not one but two personality-states to him in order to argue him round to doing whatever it was they wanted from him (that the hologram might be a brilliantly researched forgery created by SC would be even more of a compliment… but that way lay paranoia).
“I take it you had a good evening,” Tishlin’s simulation said.
“Enormous fun.”
Tishlin looked puzzled. Genar-Hofoen watched the expression form on his uncle’s face and wondered how comprehensive was the duplication of his uncle’s personality now encoded — living, if you wanted to look at it that way — in the module’s AI core. Did whatever was in there — sent here enciphered with the specific task of persuading him to cooperate with Special Circumstances — actually feel? Or did it just appear to?
Shit, I must be feeling bad, Genar-Hofoen thought. I haven’t bothered about that sort of shit since university.
“How can you have enormous fun with… aliens?” the hologram asked, eyebrows gathering.
“Attitude,” Genar-Hofoen said cryptically, slicing off more steak.
“But you can’t drink with them, eat with them, can’t really touch them, or want the same things…” Tishlin said, still frowning.
Genar-Hofoen shrugged. “It’s a kind of translation,” he said. “You get used to it.” He munched away for a moment while his uncle’s program — or whatever it was — digested this. He pointed his knife at the image. “That’s something I’d want, in the unlikely event I agree to do whatever it is they want me to do.”
“What?” Tishlin said, leaning back, arms crossed.
“I want to become an Affronter.”
Tishlin’s eyebrows elevated. “You want what, boy?” he said.
“Well, some of the time,” Genar-Hofoen said, half turning his head to the drone behind him; the machine came quickly forward and refilled his glass with the infusion. “I mean, all I want is an Affronter body, one that I can just sort of zap into and… well, just be an Affronter. You know; socialise. I don’t see what the problem is, really. In fact I keep telling them it’ll be a great thing for Culture-Affront relations. I’d really be able to relate to these guys; I could really be one of them. Hell; isn’t that what this ambassador shit is supposed to be all about?” He belched. “I’m sure it could be done. The module says it could but it shouldn’t and says it’s asked elsewhere and I know all the standard objections, but I think it’d be a great idea. I’m damn sure I’d enjoy it, I mean I could always sort of zap back into my own body anytime… this is really shocking you, isn’t it, Uncle?”
The image shook its head. “You always were the oddest child, Byr. I suppose I should have known what to expect from you. Anybody who’d go out there to live with the Affront in the first place has to be slightly strange.”
Genar-Hofoen held his arms out wide. “But I’m just doing what you did!” he protested.
“I only wanted to meet weird aliens, Byr; I didn’t want to become one of them.”
“Heck, and I thought you’d be proud of me.”
“Proud but worried. Byr, are you seriously suggesting that becoming an Affronter would be part of your price for doing what SC asks?”
“Certainly,” Genar-Hofoen said, and squinted up at the hammer-beamed ceiling. “I vaguely recall asking for a ship as well last night and the Death And Gravity saying yes…” he shook his head and laughed. “Must have imagined it.” He finished the last of the steak.