Surface Detail

“Yeah, hello,” Vatueil said cautiously. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Pleased meet you too,” Lagoarn-na said, nodding, its big yellow eyes staring at him, unblinking.

Vatueil felt a little groggy. He tried to remember where he’d been last. Where this version of himself had been last, anyway. A fellow could lose track when he was copied and re-copied so often. He started to recall sitting round a table with a bunch of aliens, in… had it been a ship? A meeting. In a ship. Not fighting a war then, trapped in tunnels or trenches or the guts of a land ship or a sea ship or a gas-giant dirigible the shape of a gigantic bomb, or finding himself downloaded into a smart battle tank or some sort of cross between a microship and a missile, or… his memories flickered past him, detailing what certainly felt like every single time he’d played a part in the vast war he’d been a part of, the war over the Hells.

It made a pleasant change for his last deployment not to have involved nuts-and-bolts, blood-and-guts soldiering – a meeting was a benign environment; potentially just as tremendously boring as war, but without the slivers of utter terror stuck in there as well. On the other hand, he felt he had just been… read somehow. All those deployments, mostly indicating gradually increasing seniority of rank and importance and responsibility, all flickering past in his memory – all tumbling past, like a pack of nearly a hundred cards – that had felt like something triggered, something called up.

Meeting. The meeting. The meeting in the ship. Lots of little aliens; one other pan-human. Big guy. Or at least important guy. He should know the name of that species too, but he couldn’t remember it.

He’d been far away for that meeting. In some rarely travelled bit of the sim… no, he’d been in the Real. In the Real again; how about that? He’d been given a re-useable, download-ready body and he’d been physically present at that meeting with the cute little aliens with the big eyes and the single larger pan-human with the hunched look and the attitude.

Still couldn’t remember the species the guy belonged to. Maybe he’d have better luck with his name. Vister? Peppra? It had been something like that. Important. Top brass in his civilian field. A big wheel. Paprus? Shepris?

He remembered not being bored at the meeting. It really had been important. In fact, he remembered feeling nervous, excited, energised, feeling that something genuinely momentous was being agreed here, and he was a part of it.

He’d been beamed into that body, transcripted into it. He might have been transcripted back out again, sent back to where he’d come from, his meeting-attending duties over. He probably had.

He looked at the big creature hanging beside him, gazing into its staring yellow eyes. “How did I come to be here?” he asked.

“How did you… get me?”

“Guff-Fuff-Kuff-Fuff not so smart.”

He stared at the creature. He closed his eyes, shook his head.

“No, sorry; didn’t get the first part of that at all.”

“GFCF not so smart,” the creature said.

Shaking his head seemed to have helped. Now he could see that the creature had straps and pouches distributed across his golden-grey furred body. Some sort of head-set – thin, metallic, glittering like jewellery – wound round the back of its skull, little armatures seeming to clasp near but not in its ears and eyes and nose and mouth.

“The GFCF?” Vatueil said. A feeling that was equal parts dread and sadness seemed to settle over him. He struggled not to show it.

“Protocols in messagery,” Lagoarn-na told him. “Gifts of knowledge, from high to low, not always maximally one-way. That which is given may give back, in time, where time is potentially quite long time. Still less so in cases of knowledge gained by chicanery, thefting. And so, resultingly, to this, and here. Plainly? Plainly: ancient code, buried; consequencing trapdoors therefore. Their ignorance thereof.”

The GFCF. And the NR. The Nauptre Reliquaria. That was the name of the species Lagoarn-na belonged to. The Nauptre, anyway. The Reliquaria bit usually referred to the machines that had taken over from them while the Nauptre themselves, the biological part of the super-species, prepared – everyone assumed – for Sublimation. That’s what had thrown him: the NR always presented as machines. You never saw the original bio species except in historical, contextual stuff.

They must have intercepted him. He’d been taken in some handover the GFCF had made of his personality construct, his mind-state, while attempting to transmit his updated, downloaded soul back to the war sim.

He wondered how bad this was, because it could be very bad. If he hadn’t made it back at all, at least people would know there had been a problem. He might only have been copied, though; maybe an identical copy had got back, and nobody had any suspicions.