Surface Detail

“Where am I really?” Lededje asked.

“How do you mean?”

“Where’s my real self, my physical body?”

Sensia stared at her again. She put the drink down on the floating tray, her expression unreadable. “Ah,” she said. She made an o with her mouth and sucked air in, turning her head to look out at the parkland surrounding the house. She turned back to look at Lededje. “What is the last thing you remember, before you woke up here?”

Lededje shook her head. “I can’t remember. I’ve been trying.”

“Well don’t try too hard. From what I can gather it’s… traumatic.”

Lededje wanted to say something to that, but couldn’t think what. Traumatic? she thought with a sudden shiver of fear. What the hell did that mean?

Sensia took a deep breath. “Let me start by explaining that I have never had to ask for somebody’s name in these circumstances. I mean, someone – you – suddenly popping into existence un -announced.” She shook her head. “Doesn’t happen. Mind-states, souls, dynamic full-brain process inventories; whatever you call them, they always come with copious notes. You didn’t.” Sensia smiled again. Lededje formed the uncomfortable impression that the other woman was trying hard to be reassuring. This had never proved to be a good sign in Lededje’s past and she seriously doubted the pattern was about to change now. “You just immaterialised here, my dear,” Sensia told her, “in a one-time, one-way emergency-entanglement vicariously inherited legacy system event of what us Minds would generally call Laughably High Unexpectancy. And most bizarrely of all you came with what one might call no paperwork, zero documentation. Absolutely without accompanying context material. Docketless.”

“Is that unusual?”

Sensia laughed. She had a surprisingly deep, almost raucous laugh. Lededje found herself smiling despite the apparent gravity of the subject. “Not so much unusual,” Sensia said. “More entirely without precedent in roughly the last fifteen hundred busy years. Frankly I’m finding that hard to believe myself and, trust me, I have lots and lots of other avatars, avatoids, agents, feelers and just plain old requests out at the moment asking if anybody else has heard of such a thing – all without positive reply so far.”

“So you had to ask me my name.”

“Quite. As a ship Mind – as any kind of Mind, or even AI – I’m sort of constitutionally forbidden from looking too deeply into you, but even so I had to do a bit of delving just to get a matchable body profile for you to wake up in without causing you further trauma, here in the Virtual.”

Didn’t entirely work, Lededje thought. I’m a negative of my real self’s colour, and- Where’s my damn tat?

Sensia continued: “Plus there’s the language protocols, obviously. They’re actually quite involved, but highly localised across pan-humanity, so easy enough to pinpoint. Could have gone deeper and got your name and other details but that would have been invasively rude. However, following some ancient guidelines so obscure that I had to actively dig them out and consult them

– designed to cover situations like this – I did what is called an Immediate Post-Traumatic Emergency Entanglement Transfer Psychological Profile Evaluation.” Another smile. “So that whatever suddenly caused you to need an entanglement event in the first place, back wherever you came from, didn’t compromise your safe transfer into Virtuality.” Sensia raised her glass again. She looked at it then put it back down again. “And what I discovered was that you’ve had a traumatic experience,” she said, quite quickly, her gaze not meeting Lededje’s. “Which I’ve sort of held back, edited from your transferred memories, just for now, while you settle in, get yourself sorted out, until you’re ready. You know.”

Lededje stared at her. “Really? You can do such a thing?”

“Oh, trivially easy, technically,” Sensia said, sounding relieved. “The constraints are entirely moral; rule-based. And it is, obviously, up to you when you come fully up to speed with yourself, if you know what I mean. Though frankly if I were you I wouldn’t be in too great a hurry.”

Lededje tried very hard to recall what had happened before she came here. She remembered being at Espersium, walking down a tree-lined avenue in the estate, alone, thinking that… it was time to escape.

Hmm, she thought. That was interesting. Was that what had happened? Had she finally found a practical, Veppers-proof method of getting away from the bastard and all his money, power and influence, using this entanglement thing? But that still left the question: where was her real self? Not to mention, why could she remember so little, and what exactly was this “trauma” Sensia kept talking about?

She drained her glass, sat up straight. “Tell me everything,” she demanded.