The giant ship watched the Excession, still billowing out towards it. For all its prodigious power, the Sleeper now felt as helpless as the driver of an ancient covered wagon, caught on a road beneath a volcano, watching the incandescent cloud of a nueé ardente tearing down the mountainside towards it.
The replies from the What Is The Answer And Why? and the Use Psychology via the Grey Area and the Jaundiced Outlook ought to be coming in soon, if they came at all.
It signalled the avatar aboard the Jaundiced Outlook to consign the humans’ mind-states to the AI cores, if the ship would agree (there would be a fine test of loyalty!). Let them work out their stories there if they could. The transition would anyway prepare the humans for the transmission of their mind-states if and when the Excession’s destructive boundary caught up with the Jaundiced Outlook; that was the only succour they could be offered.
What else?
It sifted through the things it still had left to do.
Little of real import, it reckoned. There were thousands of studies on its own behaviour it had always meant to glance at; a million messages it had never looked into, a billion life-stories it had never seen through to the end, a trillion thoughts it had never followed up…
The ship kicked through the debris of its life, watching the towering wall of the Excession come ever closer.
It scanned the articles, features, studies, biographies and stories which had been written about itself and which it had collected. There were hardly any screen works and those which did exist needn’t have; nobody had ever succeeded in smuggling a camera aboard it. It supposed it ought to feel proud of that but it didn’t. The lack of any real visual interest hadn’t put people off; they’d found the ship and the articulation of its eccentricity quite entirely fascinating. A few commentators had even come close to the reality of the situation, putting forward the idea that the Sleeper Service was part of Special Circumstances and somehow Up To Something… but any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.
Next, the Sleeper Service picked through the immense stack of unanswered messages it had accumulated over the decades. Here were all the signals it had glanced at and found irrelevant, others it had completely ignored because they issued from craft it disliked, and a whole sub-set of those it had chosen to disregard in the weeks since it had set course for the Excession. The stored signals were by turns banal and ridiculous; ships trying to reason with it, people wanting to be allowed aboard without being Stored first, news services or private individuals wanting to interview it, talk to it… untold wastages of senseless drivel. It stopped even glancing at the signals and instead just scanned the first line of each.
Towards the end of the process, one message popped up from the rest, flagged as interesting by a name-recognising sub-routine. That single signal was followed by and linked to a whole series, all from the same ship; the Limited Systems Vehicle Serious Callers Only.
Regarding Gravious, was the first line.
The Sleeper Service’s interest was piqued. So was this the entity the treacherous bird had been reporting back to? It opened a fat import-file from the LSV, full of signal exchanges, file assignments, annotated thoughts, contextualisations, definitions, posited meanings, inferences, internalised conversations, source warranties, recordings and references.
And discovered a conspiracy.
It read the exchanges between the Serious Callers Only, The Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival and the Shoot Them Later. It watched and it listened, it experienced a hundred pieces of evidence – it was briefly, amongst many other things, the ancient drone at the side of an old man called Tishlin, looking out over an island floating in a night-dark sea – and it understood; it put one and one together and came up with two; it reasoned, it extrapolated, it concluded.
The ship turned its attention back out to the Excession’s implacable advance, thinking, So now I find out; now when it’s too damn late…
The Sleeper looked back to its child, the Jaundiced Outlook, still curving away from its earlier course. The avatar was preparing the humans for the entry into simulation mode.
VII
‘I’m sorry,’ the avatar said to the two women and the man. ‘It will probably become necessary to shunt us into a simulation, if you agree.’
They all stared at it.
‘Why?’ Ulver asked, throwing her arms wide.
‘The Excession has begun expanding,’ Amorphia told them. It quickly outlined the situation.
‘You mean we’re going to die!’ Ulver said.
‘I have to confess it is a possibility,’ the avatar said, sounding apologetic.
‘How long have we got?’ Genar-Hofoen asked.
‘No more than two minutes from now. Then, entering simulation mode will become advisable,’ Amorphia told them. ‘Entering it before then might be a sensible precaution, given the unpredictable nature of the present situation.’ It glanced round at them each in turn. ‘I should also point out that of course you don’t all have to enter the simulation at the same time.’
Ulver’s eyes narrowed. ‘Wait a second; this isn’t some wheeze to concentrate everybody’s mind is it? Because if it-‘
‘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.’