Surface Detail

“Until they too are corrupted, and possibly the person invested by the device as well.”

He shrugged. “By that time the game’s pretty much up anyway, you’d imagine.”

Yime shook her head. “One might equally well imagine otherwise.”

“Whatever, they let you back-up really easily,” he said reasonably.

“That is not a life-choice I have chosen to make,” Yime informed him frostily.

“Oh well.” Costrile sighed, then accepted a long drink from somebody just out of shot. He raised it to her. “Till next time? Something more practical, I promise.”

“Till then,” she agreed. “Strength in depth.” But the screen was already blank. She said, “Close screen,” anyway, telling the relatively dumb house computer to kill any link at her end. Yime was entirely untroubled by intelligent house systems, but did not wish to be subject to one. She was happy to admit to feeling a degree of satisfaction that she was by some orders of magnitude the most intelligent entity within her immediate surroundings in general and her own living space in particular. It was not a claim one could convincingly make in very many Culture dwellings.

Prebeign-Frultesa Yime Leutze Nsokyi dam Volsh much preferred to be known only as Yime Nsokyi. She had moved away from her home Orbital and so her name now lacked utility, no longer working as even an approximate address. Worse; bearing the name of one location while living in another felt to her like something close to deceit. She walked over to the window, picked up a plain but functional brush from a small table and continued to brush her long hair, which was what she had been doing, meticulously, when the emergency militia drill alert had come through on her personal terminal and she had, reluctantly, had to submit to the induction collar and the resulting horribly realistic sim of the Orbital – even if it wasn’t this Orbital but a more standard, less militarily prepared Orbital – being so thoroughly savaged and so easily taken over.

Outside the oval of window she stood at, only very slightly distorted by the sheer thickness of the crystal and other materials forming the glazing, the view was of rolling grassy countryside punctuated with numerous lakes and strewn with forests, woods, copses and individual trees. All the windows in Yime’s apartment looked out in roughly the same direction, but had she been looking from any other apartment on this level, the view would have been much the same, plus or minus hazy views of mountains, inland seas and oceans, with no other buildings visible at all, beyond the occasional distant lake-side villa or drifting houseboat.

Despite this, Yime lived in a city, and although the construction she lived in was fairly substantial – a kilometre tall and perhaps a tenth of that across – it itself was not the totality of the metropolis, forming only a small part of it and being nowhere near the most impressive of its buildings. But then it was nowhere near any of the other buildings of the city. The building was part of a Distributed City, which to the naive or uninformed eye looked remarkably like no city whatsoever.

Most Culture cities, where they existed at all, resembled giant snowflakes, with greenery – or at least countryside, in whatever colour or form – penetrating almost to the heart of the conurbation.

Had its major buildings been gathered together on the same patch of ground, this city, Irwal, on the Orbital called Dinyol-hei, would have looked more like some vision of the far future from sometime in the enormously distant past; it was almost entirely composed of great soaring sleek skyscrapers hundreds or thousands of metres tall, generally slimly conical or ellipsoid in appearance and looking uncannily like ships, or starships, as they had once been called. Fittingly, the buildings were exactly that: ships, fully capable of existing and making their way in space, between stars, should the need ever arise.