Surface Detail

She could hear the smile in the avatar’s voice. “On the authority of me being part of the Culture and my judgement on such matters being accepted by other parts, specifically other Minds, of the Culture. Immediately, because I can. Ultimately-”

“So, even in the Culture, might is right,” Lededje said bitterly. She started rolling her sleeves down, feeling suddenly chilled.

“Intellectual might, I suppose,” Sensia said gently. “As I was about to say, though, ultimately my right to impose a slap-drone on you comes down to the principle that it is what any set of morally responsible conscious entities, machine or human, would choose to do were they in possession of the same set of facts as I am. However, part of my moral responsibility to you is to point out that you are free to publicise your case. There are specialist news services who’d certainly be interested and – you being relatively exotic and from somewhere we have few dealings with – even the general news services might be interested too. Then there are specialist legal, procedural, jurisdictional, behavioural, diplomatic…” She shrugged again. “And probably even philosophical interest groups who’d love to hear about something like this. You’d definitely find somebody who’d argue your case.”

“And who’d I be appealing to? You?”

“The court of informed public opinion,” Sensia said. “This is the Culture, kid. That’s the court of last resort. If I was convinced I’d made a mistake, or even if I thought I was right but everybody else appeared to think otherwise, I guess I’d reluctantly have to abandon the slap-drone thing. Being a ship Mind I’d take more notice of what other ship Minds thought, then other Minds in general, then AIs, humans, drones and others, though of course as this would be a dispute ultimately about a human’s rights I’d have to give more than usual weight to the human vote. It sounds a little complicated but there are all sorts of well-known precedents and much-used, highly respected processes involved.”

Sensia dipped forward and looked round at Lededje, trying to get her to look at her, though Lededje refused. “Look, Lededje, I don’t mean to make it sound off-putting at all; the whole process would seem incredibly quick and informal to somebody with your background and understanding of the way courts and legal systems work and you wouldn’t have to stay aboard me to see it through; you could start back for home and see how things turn out while you’re en route. I say it would seem informal, but it’d be extremely thorough, and, frankly, much less likely to produce an unjust result than a similar case going through the courts you have back home. If you’d like to do this, please feel free. At any time. It’s your right. Personally I don’t think you’d have a hope in hell of getting off the slap-drone thing, but one never entirely knows with such matters and continually having seemingly obvious judgements challenged is pretty much how the system works.”

Lededje thought about this. “How… secret has me being brought back to life been until now?”

“Right now, it’s just between you and me, given that I can’t find the Me, I’m Counting, the ship that we’re assuming put the neural lace into your head in the first place.”

Only after she’d done it did Lededje realise she’d put one hand to the back of her head as soon as Sensia had mentioned a lace. Her fingertips moved through the soft, short fair hair covering her scalp, tracing the contours of her own skull.

She’d been offered another neural lace, before she’d been woken up in this new body. She’d said no, and was still unsure why she’d made that choice. Anyway, one could be… installed later, even if the process required time to come to fully functioning fruition. That was what had happened with the last one, after all.

“What might have happened to the ship?” she asked. She had a sudden recollection of Himerance, sitting in the seat in her bedroom, dimly lit, talking quietly to her, ten years earlier.

“Happened to it?” Sensia sounded surprised. “Oh, it’ll be off on a retreat, probably. Or wandering aimlessly, tramping the galaxy, or doggedly pursuing some weird obsession all of its own; either way all it needs is to stop telling people where it is and it disappears off the screens. Ships do that, especially old ships.” She snorted. “Especially old ships that saw active service in the Idiran war. They’re very prone to going Eccentric.”

“So ships don’t get slap-droned?” She tried to sound sarcastic.

“Oh, but they do, if they’re especially strange, or of a certain… capital substance; a major ship.” Sensia leaned in close and said, “Ship like me went Eccentric once, or seemed to. Can you imagine?” she said, pretending horror as she nodded out at the view. “Something this size? Went totally off the rails in a crisis and shook off the ship detailed to be its slap-drone.”

“And how did that end?”

Sensia shrugged. “Not too badly. Could have been a bit better, could have been an awful lot worse.”