Surface Detail

There was some cheering. He took his place in the seat – raised just a little higher than the rest – in the bows of the slim craft.

Astil, Veppers’ butler, saw to his master’s needs while other servants moved down the central aisles of the barges, dispensing drinks. Above the seated VIPs, sun canopies rippled in the breeze. In the distance, over tree-dotted pastureland, the serried neatness of the kitchen orchards and the formal gardens of the estate, the turrets and ornamental battlements of the mansion house of Espersium were visible.

Some birds flew up from the network of small lakes, ponds and channels beneath.

The great torus-shaped mansion of Espersium sat near the centre of the estate of the same name. Espersium was easily the largest private estate in the world. Had it been a country its land area would have ranked it as the fifty-fourth largest out of the sixty-five states that still had some administrative significance in the unified world that was Sichult.

It was the centre of, and central to, the Veppers family fortune in more than merely symbolic ways. The original source of the family’s vast wealth had been computer and screen games, followed by increasingly immersive and convincing Virtual Reality experiences, sims, games, proactive fictions and multiply-shared adventures, as well as further games of every sort and every level of intricacy, from those given away as free samples on smart-paper food wrappers, through those playable on devices as small as watches or jewellery, all the way to those which demanded either total bodily immersion in semi-liquid processor goo or the more simple – but even more radical – soft-to-hard-wiring of biological brain to computational substrate.

The house had long been ringed with comms domes, kept just out of sight of the house itself but linking it – and the buried masses of computer substrate it sat on – via satellites and system-edge relay-stations to further distant processor cores and servers all over the hundreds of planets that made up Enablement space and even beyond, to similar – if as a rule not quite so developed – civilisat -ions that, with surprisingly little translation and alteration, found the games of the Veprine Corporation just as enjoyable and fascin -ating as Sichultians themselves had.

Still zealously guarding their original code, many of those games effectively reported back, eventually – via all those intervening arrays, servers, processors and substrates – to the still potent seat of power that was Espersium. From the estate house itself whole worlds and systems could be rewarded or punished according to how assiduously the local law-enforcement agencies applied anti-piracy legislation, billions of users could be granted access to the latest upgrades, tweaks and bonus levels, and lucrative personal on-line and in-game behaviour, preference and predilection data could be either used by the Veprine Corporation itself or sold on to other interested parties, either of a governmental or commercial nature.

Word had it that this sort of micro-managed operationality was no longer quite so centrally controlled, and the house had ceased to be the place that all versions of all games came to to get their latest updates – certainly there were fewer obvious satellite domes and programming geeks about the place than in the old days – but it was still much more than just a fancy country house.

The birds disturbed from the network of waterways beneath the barges wheeled in the sky, calling plaintively.

The little convoy of barges moved along a network of aqueducts poised above the watery landscape below. A couple of dozen skinny stone towers anchored the supporting stonework of delicate arches and flying buttresses which held the airborne canals aloft. At each of the towers the viaducts broadened out into circular basins collaring the slim spires and allowing the barges – individually, or joined as a tiny fleet – to change direction onto other channels. Half a dozen thicker towers held lifts within them and had quaysides where people could embark and disembark from the barges. The viaducts were only a couple of metres wide, with thin stone walls and no walkways alongside, so that one could look almost straight down.

Twenty metres beneath, in the channels, pools and lakes below, a dozen miniature battleships were just setting out from their individual start positions.

Each warship was the length of a large single-person canoe and had been designed to resemble a capital ship from the age when armour plate and large-calibre guns had ruled the seas of Sichult. Each ship contained a man, who powered his vessel by pedalling – turning a single propeller at the stern – steered it with a tiller attached to a bracket round his waist, and used his hands to aim and fire the three or four gun turrets his ship carried, each equipped with two or three guns.