Surface Detail

She inspected the tiny, almost transparent hairs on her forearm and the pores on the golden-brown skin beneath. This was a human-basic body, roughly though very convincingly amended to look like that of a Sichultian. Looking closely at individual hairs and pores, she suspected that her eyesight was better than it had been originally. There was a level of detail visible that made her head swim. She supposed that it was always possible she had been lied to and she was still within a Virtual Reality, where such zooming-in was almost easier to do than it was to limit.

She flicked her gaze out again, to the kilometres of dazzling view in front of her. Of course, even this might exist within a simulated environment. Modelling such a vast ship within even the most detailed image of reality must be easier than actually building one, and certainly any people capable of constructing such a vessel could command the relatively trivial computational resources necessary to create an utterly convincing simulation of what she could see and hear and feel and smell before her now.

It could always all be unreal – how could you ever tell otherwise? You took it on trust, in part because what would be the point of doing anything else? When the fake behaved exactly like the real, why treat it as anything different? You gave it the benefit of the doubt, until something proved otherwise.

Waking in this real body had been similar to waking up within the fake body imagined in the great ship’s substrate. She had experienced a slow, pleasant coming-to, the warm fuzziness of what had felt like deep, satisfying sleep changing slowly to the clarity and sharpness of a wakefulness informed by the knowledge that something had profoundly changed.

Embodied, she’d thought. Embodiment was all, Sensia had told her, ironically while they were talking in the Virtual. An intelligence completely dissociated from the physical, or at least an impression of it, was a strange, curiously limited and almost perverse thing, and the precise form that your physicality took had a profound, in some ways defining influence on your personality.

She had opened her eyes and found herself in a bed of what looked like snowflakes, felt like feathers and behaved like particularly obedient and well-disposed insects. White as snow but nearly as warm as her skin, the material had seemed unconstrained by any enveloping cover, and yet the apparently free-floating individual elements had refused to get in her eyes, up her nose or to leave the confines of the bed and the few centimetres around both it and her pyjama-clad body.

Beyond the bed had been a modest, sparsely furnished room three or four metres to a side with one window-wall looking out onto a brightly lit balcony where she could see Sensia sitting in one of two chairs. The avatar had gazed out at the view for a few more moments before turning to her and smiling.

“Welcome to the land of the living!” she’d said, waving one hand. “Get dressed; we’ll have some lunch and then we’ll go exploring.”

So now here they sat, with Lededje trying to take in what she was seeing.

She looked back at her arm again. She had chosen pale purple blouson pants, cuffed tight at the ankle, and a filmy but opaque long-sleeved top of the same colour, sleeves rolled back to the elbows. She looked pretty good, all-in-all, she thought. The average Culture human, from what she could gather having seen a few hundred of them now in passing – and disregarding the outlandish outliers, as it were – was hardly taller than a well-fed Sichultian, but ill-proportioned: legs too short, back too long, and emaciated-looking; bellies and behinds uncomfortably flat, shoulders and upper back looking almost broken. She supposed to them she looked hump-backed, pot-bellied and big-bottomed, but no matter; to her she looked exactly, almost perfectly right. And a beauty, which was what she had always been and had always been destined to be, with or without the cell-level markings that had invested her body, down to the bone and beyond.

She had no more false modesty, she realised, than Sensia, than the ship itself.

Lededje looked up from her arm. “I think I’d like some form of tat,” she told Sensia.

“Tattooing?” the avatar said. “Easily done. Though we can definitely do better than just permanently marking your skin, unless that’s what you specifically want.”

“What, for example?”

“Take a look.” Sensia waved one arm and in front of them, and, hanging over the thousand-metre drop, a series of images appeared of Culture humans displaying tattoos even more fabulous than her own had been, at least at skin level. Here were tattoos that genuinely shone rather than just glowed a little, or could reflect; tattoos that moved, that lased, that could loop out to create real or hologramatic structures beyond the surface of the skin itself, tattoos that were not just works of art but ongoing performances. “Have a think,” Sensia said.