Surface Detail

“In the whole Sichultian Enablement. And the most powerful.” Himerance sighed. “There are limits to what I can do anyway. You have your own way of living here, on this world and within the hegemony you call the Enablement; your own rules, mores, customs and laws. It is not regarded as good form to go interfering in the societies of others unless one has a very good reason, and an agreed-on strategic plan. However much we might wish to, we cannot simply indulge our own sentimental urges. I am genuinely sorry, but, sadly, what you ask is not within my gift.”

“So, nothing in it for me,” she said, and knew that she sounded bitter.

“I’m sure I could set up a bank account with a sum in it that might help you-”

“Like Veppers will ever let me have any sort of independent life,” she said, shaking her head.

“Well, perhaps-”

“Oh, just do it,” she said. She hugged her legs tighter, looked at him. “Do I need to stand up or anything?”

“No. Are you sure-?”

“Just do it,” she repeated fiercely.

“I might still be able to suggest some kind of compensatory-”

“Yes, yes. Whatever you think fit. Surprise me.”

“Surprise you?”

“You heard.”

“You are sure about this?”

“I’m sure, I’m sure. Have you done it yet?”

*

“Ah-ha,” Sensia purred, nodding her head slowly. “That does

sound like it.”

“That ship put the neural lace thing in my head?”

“Yes. Well… it would have planted the seed of one; they grow.”

“I didn’t feel anything at the time.”

“Well, you wouldn’t.” Sensia looked out towards the desert. “Yes, the Me, I’m Counting,” she said, and Lededje got the impression Sensia was really talking to herself. “Hooligan-class LOU. Declared as an Eccentric and Ulteriored itself over a millennium ago. Dropped out of view completely a couple of years back. Probably on a retreat.”

Lededje sighed heavily. “My own fault for saying “Surprise me”, I guess.” Inside, though, she was elated. The mystery was solved, almost certainly, and it had been a good bargain; she had been saved from death, in a sense at least.

But what is to become of me? she thought. She looked at Sensia, still staring out into the shimmering warmth of distance where dust devils danced and the horizon quivered in a mirage of lake or sea.

What is to become of me? she wondered. Did she depend upon the charity of this virtual woman? Was she subject to some legal agreement between the Culture and the Enablement? Was she now somebody or something else’s possession or plaything? She might as well ask, she supposed.

She immediately found herself preparing to use what she thought of as her little voice: the meek, low, soft, childlike tone she used when she was trying to make her own vulnerability and powerlessness known, when she was trying to play upon somebody’s sympathies, make them feel sorry for her and so less likely to hurt or demean her and perhaps even let her have something she wanted. It was a technique she had used on everyone from her mother to Veppers, mostly with a lot more success than failure. But she hesitated. It had never been a ruse she had been very proud of, and here the rules had changed, everything was different. For her own pride, for the sake of what might be a fresh start, she would ask it straight, without deliberate inflection.

“So,” she said, looking not at Sensia but out at the desert, “what is to become of me, Sensia?”

The older woman looked at her. “Become of you? You mean what happens now, where do you go?”

Still not daring to meet the other woman’s gaze, she nodded. “Yes.”

What a strange, almost absurd situation to be in, she thought. To be in this perfect but… self-confessed simulation, talking to a glorified computer about her fate, her life from this point on. What would happen next? Would she be left free to wander and somehow make a life within this virtual world? Would she be in some sense returned to Sichult, even to Veppers? Could she simply be turned off as just a program, nothing genuinely alive at all? The following few seconds, the next sentence out of Sensia’s unreal, virtually modelled mouth, would like as not turn her life one way or the other: to despair, to triumph, to outright annihilation. It all came down – unless she was already being deeply deceived about where she was and who she was really talking to – to what was said in the next moment.

Sensia blew her cheeks out. “Largely up to you, Lededje. You’re in a nearly unique situation so there’s no particular precedent, but zero documentation or not you’re essentially a fully functioning, viable independent mind-state and incontrovertibly sentient, with all that that implies regarding rights and so on.”

“What does that imply?” Lededje asked. She was already feeling relieved but she wanted to be sure.

Sensia grinned. “Only good things, really. The first thing I imagine you might want to do is to be revented.”

“What does that mean?”

“Technical term for being brought back to life in a physical body back in the Real.”