Diaspora

"Yes." Inoshiro stretched out vis hand, and a flower sprouted from the palm, a green-and-violet orchid which emitted an Ashton-Laval library address. "I didn't call you before, because you might have told Blanca… and then it would have got back to one of my parents. And you know what they're like."

Yatima shrugged. "You're a citizen, it's none of their business."

Inoshiro rolled vis eyes and gave ver vis best martyred look. Yatima doubted that ve'd ever understand families: there was nothing any of Inoshiro's relatives could do to punish ver for using the outlook, let alone actually stop ver. All reproving messages could he filtered out; all family gatherings that turned into haranguing sessions could he instantly deserted. Yet Blanca's parents—three of them Inoshiro's—had badgered ver into breaking up with Gabriel (if only temporarily); the prospect of exogamy with Carter-Zimmerman was apparently beyond the pale. Now that they were together again, Blanca (for some reason) had to avoid Inoshiro as well as the rest of the family—and presumably Inoshiro no longer feared that vis part-sibling would blab.

Yatima was a little wounded. "I wouldn't have told Blanca, if you'd asked me not to."

"Yeah, yeah. Do you think I don't remember? Ve practically adopted you."

"Only when I was in the womb!" Yatima still liked Blanca very much, but they didn't even see each other all that often, now.

Inoshiro sighed. "Okay: I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner. Now are you going to come see the piece?"

Yatima sniffed the flower again, warily. The Ashton-Laval address smelt distinctly foreign… but that was just unfamiliarity. Ve had vis exoself take a copy of the outlook and scrutinize it carefully. Yatima knew that Radiya, and most other miners, used outlooks to keep themselves focused on their work, gigatau after gigatau. Any citizen with a mind broadly modeled on a flesher's was vulnerable to drift: the decay over time of even the most cherished goals and values. Flexibility was an essential part of the flesher legacy, but after a dozen computational equivalents of the pre-Introdus lifespan, even the most robust personality was liable to unwind into an entropic mess. None of the polises' founders had chosen to build predetermined stabilizing mechanisms into their basic designs, though, lest the entire species ossify into tribes of self-perpetuating monomaniacs, parasitized by a handful of memes. It was judged far safer for each citizen to he free to choose from a wide variety of outlooks: software that could run inside your exoself and reinforce the qualities you valued most, if and when you felt the need for such an anchor. The possibilities for short-term cross-cultural experimentation were almost incidental.

Each outlook offered a slightly different package of values and aesthetics, often built up from the ancestral reasons-to-be-cheerful that still lingered to some degree in most citizens' minds: Regularities and periodicities—rhythms like days and seasons. Harmonies and elaborations, in sounds and images, and in ideas. Novelty. Reminiscence and anticipation. Gossip, companionship, empathy, compassion. Solitude and silence. There was a continuum which stretched all the way from trivial aesthetic preferences to emotional associations to the cornerstones of morality and identity.

Yatima had vis exoself's analysis of the outlook appear in the scape in front of ver as a pair of before-and-after maps of vis own most affected neural structures. 

The maps were like nets, with spheres at every junction to represent symbols; proportionate changes in the symbols' size showed how the outlook would tweak them.

"'Death' gets a tenfold boost? Spare me."

"Only because it's so underdeveloped initially."

Yatima shot ver a poisonous look, then rendered the snaps private, and stood examining them with an air of intense concentration.

"Make up your mind; it's starting soon."

"You mean make my mind Hashim's?"

"Hashim doesn't use an outlook."

"So it's all down to raw artistic talent? Isn't that what they all say?"

"Just… make a decision."

Vis exoself's verdict on the potential for parasitism was fairly sanguine, though there could be no guarantees. If ve ran the outlook for a few kilotau, ve ought to be able to stop.

Yatima made a matching flower grow from vis own palm. "Why do you keep talking me into these crazy stunts?"

Inoshiro's face formed the pure gestalt sign for unappreciated benefactor. "If I don't save you from the Mines, who will?"