‘It is not,’ Amorphia assured her. ‘Would you like to take a look?’
‘Yes,’ Ulver said, and an instant later her neural lace had plunged her senses into the awareness of the Sleeper Service.
She gazed into the depths of space outside space. The Excession was a vast bisected wall of fiery chaos sprinting out towards her, breathtakingly fast; a consuming conflagration of unremitting, undissipating power. She could have believed, in that instant, that her heart stopped with the shock of it. To share the senses of a ship in such a manner was inevitably to comprehend something of its knowledge as well, to see beyond the mere appearance of what you were looking at to the reality behind it, to the evaluations it was incumbent upon a sentient space craft to make as it gathered data in the raw, to the comparisons that could be drawn and the implications that followed on such a phenomenon, and even as Ulver’s senses reeled with the impact of what she was watching, another part of her mind was becoming aware of the nature and the power of the sight she was witnessing. As a thermonuclear fireball was to a log burning in a grate, so this ravening cloud of destruction was to a fusion explosion. What she was now witnessing was something even the GSV was undeniably impressed with, not to mention mortally threatened by.
Ulver saw how to click out of the experience, and did so.
She’d been in for less than two seconds. In that time her heart had started racing, her breathing had become fast and laboured and a cold sweat had broken on her skin. Wow, she thought, some drug!
Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil Gelian were staring at her. She suspected she hardly needed to say anything, but swallowed and said, ‘I don’t think it’s kidding.’
She quizzed her neural lace. Twenty-two seconds had elapsed since the avatar had given them its two-minute deadline.
Dajeil turned to the avatar. ‘Is there anything we can do?’ she asked.
Amorphia spread its hands. ‘You can tell me whether you each wish your mind-state to enter the simulation,’ it said. ‘It will be a precursor to transmitting the mind-states beyond this immediate vicinity to other Mind matrices. But in any event it is up to you.’
‘Well, yes,’ Ulver said. ‘Snap me in there when the two minutes are up.’
Thirty-three seconds elapsed.
Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil were looking at each other.
‘What about the child?’ the woman asked, touching the bulge of her swollen belly.
‘The mind-state of the fetus can be read too, of course,’ the avatar said. ‘I believe that historical precedent would indicate it would become independent of you following such transferal. In that sense, it would no longer be part of you.’
‘I see,’ the woman said. She was still gazing at the man. ‘So it would be born,’ she said quietly.
‘In a sense,’ the avatar agreed.
‘Could it be taken into the simulation without me?’ she asked, still watching Byr’s face. He was frowning now, looking sad and concerned and shaking his head.
‘Yes, it could,’ Amorphia said.
‘And if,’ Dajeil said, ‘I chose that neither of us went?’
The avatar sounded apologetic again; ‘The ship would almost certainly read its mind-state anyway.’
Dajeil turned her gaze to the avatar. ‘Well, would it or wouldn’t it?’ she asked. ‘You are the ship; you tell me.’
Amorphia shook its head once. ‘I don’t represent the whole consciousness of the Sleeper right now,’ it told her. ‘It is busy with other matters. I can only guess. But I’d be pretty confident of such a conjecture, in this case.’
Dajeil studied the avatar a moment longer, then looked back at Genar-Hofoen. ‘And what about you, Byr?’ she asked. ‘What would you do?’
He shook his head. ‘You know,’ he said.
‘Still the same?’ she asked, a small smile on her face.
He nodded. His expression was similar to hers.
Ulver was looking from one to the other, brows creased, desperately trying to work out what was going on. Finally, when they still just sat there on opposite sides of the table giving each other this knowing grin, she threw her arms wide again and yelled, spluttering, ‘Well? What?’
Seventy-two seconds elapsed.
Genar-Hofoen glanced at her. ‘I always said I’d live once and then die,’ he said. ‘Never to be reborn, never to enter a simulation.’ He shrugged and looked embarrassed. ‘Intensity,’ he said. ‘You know; make the most of your one time.’
Ulver rolled her eyes. ‘Yeah, I know,’ she said. She’d met a lot of people her own age, mostly male, who felt this way. Some people reckoned to live riskier and therefore more interesting lives because they did back-up a recorded mind-state every so often, while other people - like Genar-Hofoen, obviously (they’d been together for so brief a time it wasn’t something they’d got round to discussing yet) - believed that you were more likely to live your life that bit more vividly when you knew this was your one and only chance at it. She’d formed the impression this was the kind of thing people often said when they were young and then had second thoughts about as they got older. Personally Ulver had never had any time for this fashionable purist nonsense; she’d first decided she was going to live fully backed-up when she was eight. She supposed she ought to feel impressed that Genar-Hofoen was sticking to his principles in the face of imminent death - and she did feel a little admiration - but mostly she just thought he was being stupid.
She wondered whether she ought to mention that this might all be even more academic than they imagined; part of that referential knowledge she’d gained from the Sleeper Service’s senses when she’d gazed upon the expanding Excession had been the realisation that there was a theoretical possibility the phenomenon might overwhelm everything; the galaxy, the universe, everything . . . Best not to say anything, she thought. Kinder not to. Sure had her heart thumping, though. She was surprised the others couldn’t hear it.
Oh shit. It isn’t all going to end here, is it? Fuck it; I’m too young to die!
No, of course they couldn’t hear her heart; she could probably start talking out loud right now and it would take them all the time they had left in this world to react, they were so wrapped up staring meaningfully into each other’s eyes.
Eighty-eight seconds elapsed.
VIII
There was not long now. The Sleeper Service sent signals to a variety of craft, including the Serious Callers Only and the Shoot Them Later. Almost immediately, the signals it had been waiting for came back from the What Is The Answer And Why? and the Use Psychology, relayed through the Grey Area and the Jaundiced Outlook.
The Excession’s expansion was localised; centred on the Sleeper Service itself but on a hugely broad front that encompassed all its distributed warcraft.
Ah well, it thought. It felt a dizzying sense of relief that at least it had not triggered some ultimate apocalypse. That it would die (as would, implicitly, all its warship children, the three humans aboard and possibly the Grey Area, the Jaundiced Outlook) was bad enough, but it could take some comfort that its actions had led to nothing worse.
The GSV never really knew why it did what it did next; perhaps it was a kind of desperation at work born of its appreciation of its impending destruction, perhaps it meant it as an act of defiance, perhaps it was even something closer to an act of art. Whatever; it took the running up-date of its mind-state, the current version of the final signal it would ever send, the communication that would contain its soul, and transmitted it directly ahead, signalling it into the maelstrom.
Then the Sleeper Service glanced back to the sensorium of its avatar aboard the Jaundiced Outlook.
At the same moment, the Excession’s expanding boundary started to change. The ship split its attention between the macrocosmic and the human-scale.
‘How long have we got now?’ Genar-Hofoen asked.
‘Half a minute,’ Amorphia replied.
The man’s hands were on the table. He rolled his arms, letting his hands fall open. He gazed at Dajeil. ??
?I’m sorry,’ he said.
She looked down, nodding.
He looked at Ulver, smiling sadly.
The Sleeper watched, fascinated. The wall of energy tumbling towards it sloped slowly back within both hyperspatial domains, forming two immense four-dimensional cones as the energy grid’s withering blast hesitated in its progress across the skein of real space even as its slowing wave-fronts still thrust out across the grids’ surfaces. The slopes’ angles increased as the boundary’s skein presence began to break up, detaching from the grids themselves and beginning to dissipate. Finally the separate waves on the grids began to dwindle, collapsing back from their tsunamic dimensions to become just oceanically enormous swells, deflating above and below the skein until they were mere twin waves advancing across both the energy grids towards the doubled furrows which the Sleeper’s own motors were still churning in the grid.
Then those twinned waves did the impossible; they went into reverse, retreating back towards the Excession’s start-point at exactly the same rate as the Sleeper was braking.
The GSV kept on slowing down, still finding it hard to believe it was going to live.
It reacts, it thought. It signalled abroad with the details of what had just happened, just in case it all got suddenly threatening again. It let Amorphia know what had happened, too.
It watched the ridges on the surface of the grids as they retreated before it and slowly shrank. The rate of attenuation implied a zero-state at exactly the point the Sleeper Service would come to an Excession-relative halt.
Did I do that?
Did my own mind-state persuade it of my meriting life?
It is a mirror, perhaps, it thought. It does what you do. It absorbed those ultimate absorbers, those promiscuous experiencers, the Elench; it leaves alone and watches back those who come merely to watch in the first place.
I came at it like some rabid missile and it prepared to obliterate me; I backed off and it withdrew its balancing threat.
Only a theory, of course, but if it is correct . . .
This does not bode well for the Affront.
Come to think of it, it doesn’t bode all that well for the whole affair.
Bad timing, maybe.
IX
Dajeil looked up, tears in her eyes. ‘I--’ she began.
‘Wait,’ the avatar said.
They all looked at it.
Ulver gave the creature what seemed to her like an extraordinarily long time to say something more. ‘What?’ she said, exasperated.
The avatar looked radiant. ‘I think we may be all right after all,’ it said, smiling.
There was silence for a moment. Then Ulver collapsed back dramatically in her seat, arms dangling towards the floor, legs splayed out under the table, gaze directed upwards at the translucent dome. ‘Fucking hell!’ she shouted. She tried accessing the Jaundiced Outlook’s senses, and eventually found a view of hyperspace ahead of the Sleeper Service. More or less back to normal, indeed. She shook her head. ‘Fucking hell,’ she muttered.
Dajeil began to weep. Genar-Hofoen sat forward, watching her, one hand to his mouth, pinching his lower lip.
The black bird Gravious, which had been peeking round the corner of the door and shivering with fear for the last few minutes, suddenly bounced beating into the air in a dark confusion of furious movement and started wheeling round the room screaming, ‘We’re alive! We’re going to live! It’s going to be all right! Yee-ha! Oh, life, life, sweet life!’
Neither Dajeil nor Genar-Hofoen seemed to notice it.
Ulver glanced from one to the other then leapt up and tried to grab the fluttering bird. It yelped. ‘Oi! What--?’
‘Out, you idiot!’ Ulver hissed, lunging at it again as it swooped for the door. She followed it, turning briefly to mutter, ‘Excuse me,’ to the others. She closed the door.
X
The Torturer class Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time had been far enough away from the Sleeper Service and its war fleet not to have felt threatened by the Excession’s projected blast-front and yet close enough to see what the GSV had done.
It had looked upon the vast weapon that the Excession had unleashed and been dumbstruck with awe and a microscopic amount of jealousy; hell, it wished it could do that! But then the weapon had been turned off, called back. Now the Killing Time had a new series of emotions to cope with.
It looked at the ships the Sleeper Service had scattered about it and felt an instant of disappointment; there would be no battle. No real battle, anyway.
Then it experienced elation. They had won!
Then it felt suspicious. Was the Sleeper actually on the same side as it, or not?
It hoped they were all on the same side; even the most glorious of sacrifices began to look rather futile and pointless when carried out against such ludicrous odds; like spitting into a volcano . . .
Just then the Sleeper Service signalled the warship and asked a favour of it, and the Killing Time felt pretty damn good again; honoured, in fact. This was what war should be like!
The Killing Time agreed to do as the GSV requested. The ROU sounded proud. It was not an attractive tone. How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails.
Of course, this was only one fray. There was another matter to be dealt with; the Excession, and it had proved comprehensively unable to provide any sort of answer to that.
Anyway, I ought not to be so hard on the Killing Time just because it is a warship. There have been a surprising number of wise warships. Though it would be fair to say - as I think even they would admit - that few started out headed on such a course.
To live for ever and die often, it considered. Or at least to think that you’re going to die. Perhaps that is one way of achieving
wisdom. It was not a completely original insight, but it was one that had, perhaps understandably, never struck the GSV with such force before.
The Sleeper watched the humans aboard the Jaundiced Outlook respond as the avatar told them they’d been reprieved. It would follow their reactions, of course, but it had other things to do at the same time. Like think about what it was to do with the new knowledge it had.
It watched its distributed warcraft rise within the skein of real space; raptors within an infinite sky. Meat, could it do some goodly mischief now . . . It started by diverting a few hundred ships in the direction of the Not Invented Here.
XI
The Grey Area watched the Excession’s fiery tide fall back and reduce almost to nothing. They were going to live! Probably.
The Sleeper’s three warships continued to decelerate it down to the velocities its engines would be able to cope with. They seemed to have been perfectly undisturbed by the whole appalling scenario. Perhaps, thought the Grey Area, there was after all something to be said for being a relatively brainless AI core.
~ That was close! it sent to them.
~ Yes, said one of the craft, flatly. The others remained silent.
~ Weren’t you a little worried there? it asked the talkative one.
~ No. What would be the point of worrying?
~ Ha! Well, indeed, the Grey Area sent. Cretin, it thought.
It looked back out, ahead, to where the Excession was. And what of you? it thought. Something that could put the fear of death into a GSV. That really was something. What are you? it wondered.
How it would love to know.
~ Excuse me while I signal, it said to its military escorts.
[tight beam, Mclear, tra. @4.28.891.7352]
xGCU Grey Area
oExcession call-signed “I”
Let’s talk, shall we?
XII
Captain Greydawn Latesetting X of the Farsight tribe stared at the display. The vast pulse of energy the thing near Esperi had directed at the Culture General Systems Vehicle had disappeared. In its place, as though appearing from behind it, was . . . It could not be so. He checked. He contacted his comrade
s in the other ships. Those who answered thought it must be some malfunction in their vessels’ sensors; an effect of the energies which had been directed at the giant Culture craft. He asked his own ship, the Heavy Messing.
~ What is that?
~ That is a cloud of warships, it told him.
~ A what?
~ I think it best described as a cloud of warships. This is not a generally accepted term, I hasten to add, but I cannot think of a better description. I count approximately eighty thousand craft.
~ Eighty thousand!
~ The rest of our fleet has arrived at roughly the same estimation. The ships within the cloud are, of course, broadcasting their positions and configuration, otherwise we should not see them individually and know what they are. There may be others which are not making themselves known.
A growing sense of horror and looming, utterly ignominious defeat was growing in Greydawn’s interior. ~ Are they real? he asked.
~ Apparently.
Greydawn watched the image expand; it was a wall of ships, a constellation, a galaxy of craft.
~ What are they doing now? he asked.
~ Deploying to face our fleet.
‘They are . . . enemy?’ he asked, feeling faint.
‘Ah,’ said the ship. ‘We’re talking now, yes?’
It was only then the Affronter realised he’d spoken rather than sub-vocalised the text. ‘All the ships,’ the Heavy Messing said, its voice steady, calm and deep inside Greydawn’s armoured suit, ‘are signalling that they are Culture ships, non standard, manufactured by the Eccentric GSV Sleeper Service and that they wish to receive our surrender.’
‘Can we get to the Esperi entity before they intercept us?’
‘No.’
‘Can we outrun them?’
‘The smallest and most numerous ones, perhaps.’
‘How many would that leave?’
‘About thirty thousand.’
Greydawn was silent for a while. Then he asked, ‘Is there anything we can do?’