∞
Uh-huh. We’ll see. Makes the Beats Working’s oddly enabling behaviour look positively normal, for sure. Giving pickup-backs to the Ronte. I mean, really. Mind you, they were going so slowly. It probably got bored. What do you think?
∞
I think there’s a reason there are so few of the Scree class, despite the fact they’re the smallest, energy-cheapest to build of all the Contact Units. Five humans is just too small a crew; they’re almost guaranteed to go a bit mad. It’s like the opposite of being outnumbered; the more humans you have aboard you, the better their eccentricities average out and you’re left with something easy to model, anticipate and influence. You have safety in their numbers. Five bios and one Mind, in one teeny wee ship? Their basic insanity is going to manifest. And it’s reality-distorting; infectious, practically. Always going to end badly.
∞
Yes, but you can always kick a human crew off at the next GSV if you really don’t get on. Not as bad as becoming a “hybrid”, with alien operating system shit incorporated. That’s just… perverted.
∞
The Culture had a problem with the rump of the Zihdren civilisation that the Zihdren-Remnanters represented. It was the same problem they had with most other light-basking species. The whole comms and data network of such beings was not something truly independent of them as creatures; instead it was effectively an extension of them as a mass of interconnected individuals, and so the Culture, with its self-imposed embargo on reading the minds of other beings, regarded it as immoral to investigate even aspects of the Remnanters’ existence as seemingly impersonal and banal as their data reservoirs without specific permission, something that had, to date at least, rarely been forthcoming.
It meant that the Remnanters were slightly mysterious as far as the Culture was concerned; they were less than perfectly known and understood, they were incompletely assessed, intrinsically beyond certain very useful forms of analysis, proof against being properly simmed and so, in theory, capable of surprising the Culture. This was a devilishly itchy, annoying thing for your average Mind — had there even been such a thing — to have to address.
It was just as well that the Remnanters were little more than a civilisational after-thought, an only-visible-at-high-magnification detail on the vast, ever-changing galactic map, and that — at least for now — there were only a few other similar species making any ripples in the big shared paddling pond of the big G; imagine — so went a popular nightmare scenario for ships of a certain disposition who worried about this sort of stuff — having to cope with the Zihdren themselves when they’d been in their pomp!
On the other hand there were species/civs with no such compunctions who regularly investigated as deeply as possible into the minds of others — especially when they were as weird as the Remnanters — and would cheerfully share the information with anybody who asked.
As long as no favours were promised in return, the Culture would — reluctantly, even a little guiltily — use that kind of information, just to keep from being too embarrassingly ignorant.
Scoaliera Tefwe woke slowly, as she had woken slowly a few dozen times, over the intervening centuries.
Only it wasn’t really waking slowly; she was being woken.
All dark at first. Stillness and silence too, and yet the sensation that things were happening, both inside her head and body; organs and systems and faculties being woken, revived, checked, primed, readied.
It was at once reassuring and somehow disappointing. Here we go again, she thought. Hmm. That thought itself felt… familiar. She opened her eyes.
She was sort of expecting to see the word SIMULATION, however briefly, but it wasn’t there. She blinked, looked around.
She was floating in some sort of suspensor field, in air, in a human or humanoid body dressed in some clingy but lightly puffed cover-all which left only her feet, hands and head exposed. She was held reclined in the air. It was as though she was sitting in an invisible chair. A boxy ship drone was at eye-level, looking at her. The room around her appeared to be medical unit standard.
“Ms Tefwe?” the drone said.
“Reporting,” she said. She looked at her hand. It looked like her hand, though she knew enough to know that meant almost nothing. “A reverser field, please?”
The drone put a screen in front of her, showing her her own face. She touched the skin on her cheek, pressed her nose one way then the other. Looked like her face.
She remembered talking with the avatoid of the You Call This Clean? in a virtual environment. She remembered waking in reality in the medical facility of the Outstanding Contribution To The Historical Process, and she remembered the journey across the desert on the aphore, to go and talk to the old drone Hassipura Plyn-Frie.
She had stayed with it for a couple of days, calling in a supply drop from the Orbital’s Hub to feed and water the animal at the end of that first day.
The VFP had been annoyed at her dallying but had not zapped her back to it without permission. The important part of its mission had already been carried out; it had transmitted the information on QiRia’s location to the other interested ships. It could afford to let her spend a while with the ancient drone and its sandstreams.
Another ship, another VFP, the Rapid Random Response Unit, had been time-closest to Cethyd and had started out for the planet within a second of the information being picked up. It had started readying one of the handful of humanoid simulacra bodies it carried aboard, instructing the creature’s physiological systems to alter the blank-basic body’s appearance so that it would resemble Tefwe. The transfer of Tefwe’s updated mind-state could wait until the last hour or so before deployment, hence the relaxed attitude the Outstanding… was able to take to Tefwe’s delaying tactics.
The Rapid Random Response Unit’s flight time to Cethyd had been two and a half days; a lucky proximity, Tefwe guessed, given that the place was, as Hassipura had suggested, kind of off the beaten track, in a system called Heluduz in one of the faint tendrils of stars that lay on the very outskirts of the galaxy, spun out from the rim like the exhaust from a spent firework.
The place itself was nothing special; just a biggish rocky world with a thick though transparent oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere and a small majority of land compared to deep ocean.
After her surprisingly extended jaunt to see Hassipura’s sandstreams, Tefwe had ridden off again on the aphore Yoawin. The ship had Displaced both of them as soon as they dropped more than a couple of metres beyond the pass, depositing a very confused aphore straight back into its stables in the livery at Chyan’tya.
Tefwe went back to the ship, where her mind-state was, finally, read and transmitted to the Rapid Random Response Unit half a day before it reached the planet of Cethyd, while it was still checking and re-checking its Displacer components, testing the system with dummy payloads and planning its brake points and loop-return profiles.
Tefwe shook her head. “Is this really necessary?”
“This would represent an absolute minimum,” the boxy ship drone told her.
Tefwe looked down at herself. The ship had insisted she wear what appeared to her like a grossly over-spec’d suit. She looked, she thought, like she’d been dipped in a thick layer of sticky mercury.
The suit was only about five or six millimetres thick and seemed to weigh almost nothing, plus it thinned so much over her hands and especially her fingers that she half expected to see her fingerprints through the silver covering, but it was meant to be terribly effective. Well, once the helmet component had rolled up, it was just a roll round her neck at the moment, like a thick metallic scarf. Obviously the tech had moved on since the last time she’d needed to be protected at anything like this level.