Surface Detail

time, and inspected the sky with its many little puffy white clouds.

She had experienced simulations before; she had been in virtual environments, but even the ones that relied on you being dosed with just the right drugs, so that you did a lot of the detail-filling yourself, were nothing like as perfectly convincing as this. The simulations she had experienced were closer to dreams than reality; convincing at the time, but pretty much the moment you started looking for the pixels or the grain or the fractals or whatever they were — or just the processing short cuts and inconsistencies — you found them. What she was looking at here — and feeling, and smelling — was effectively, uncannily flawless. She almost felt faint for an instant, head briefly swimming before quickly clearing again before she even started to sway or stagger.

Nevertheless: the sky was too blue, the sunlight too golden, the hills and especially the mountains didn’t quite fade and drop away like they did on a real planet, and while she still felt entirely like herself within herself — as it were — she was inside a body which was perfectly, flawlessly unmarked, causing her to feel more naked than she had ever felt in her life. No intaglia, no tattoo, no markage whatsoever. That was the biggest clue of all that this could not be real.

Well, the second biggest; there was that word, floating in red, always at the lower limit of her vision. SIMULATION. That was about as unambiguous as you got, she supposed.

From the balcony, she took a look around what she could see of the building. Just a big, rather ornate red sandstone house with lots of tall windows; some sticky-out bits, a few turrets, a pathway of small stones around the base. Listening carefully she could hear what might be the breeze in the nearest treetops, some high, slightly plaintive calls that probably represented birdsong and a faint lowing from the herd of four-legged grazing animals in the meadow.

She walked back into the bedroom and stood in its relative silence. She cleared her throat.

“All right, it’s a simulation. Anybody here I can talk to?”

No answer. She drew in the breath to say something else, but then there came a polite knocking from one of the room’s two broad wooden doors.

“Who’s there?” she called.

“My name is Sensia,” a pleasant-sounding female voice said. She’d have guessed it belonged to a relatively elderly woman, and one who was smiling as she spoke. She’d had a favourite aunt who’d sounded like this person, though perhaps not quite as well-spoken.

“One moment.” She looked down at herself. She imagined wearing a plain white dressing gown. Nope; her body remained stubbornly naked.

What looked like a tall wooden wardrobe stood near the door. She swung open the doors, wondering why she was doing so even as she did it. She was in a simulation, this didn’t even look like her own body anyway and she had never been especially self-conscious about her physical form — how could she be, as an Intagliate? The notion would have been hilarious if not so intimately connected with bitterness. Still, she did feel exceptionally naked with no markings, and the general feel and polite, highly monied ambience of this sim would appear to demand a certain decorum.

There were lots of rather gorgeous clothes inside the wardrobe; she threw on a plain, dark blue robe of what felt like the same material the liquid-soft sheet had been made of. She stood before the broad door, cleared her throat again, drew herself up and pulled on the fist-sized handle.

“Hello,” said the rather plain but very amiable-looking lady of late middle age standing outside. Behind her was a broad hallway with more doors leading off on one side and balustrades giving out onto a double-level hall on the other. “May I come in?” She had bunned white hair, sparkling green eyes and was dressed in a plain dark suit, unadorned.

“Please, do,” she said.

Sensia looked around, softly clapping her frail-looking hands once. “Shall we sit outside? I’ve sent for some drinks.”

They dragged a couple of heavy, brocaded seats out through the middle window onto the most generous of the room’s balconies, and sat down.

Her eyes stay too wide, she found herself thinking. She’s facing into the sunlight; a real person would be squinting by now, wouldn’t they?

On a ledge above, two small blue birds appeared to be fighting, rising at each other on a furious flutter of wings and almost touching breasts in mid-air before falling back again, all of this accompanied by a great deal of high-pitched twittering.

Sensia smiled warmly, clasping her hands. “So,” she said. “We are in a simulation.”

“I gathered,” she said, the word itself seemingly printed across the legs of the woman opposite.

“We’ll remove that,” Sensia said. The word disappeared from her field of vision. That felt briefly scary, though presumably she was always going to be under somebody’s control, in a sim. Sensia sat forward. “Now, this might sound a little odd, but would you mind terribly telling me your name?”

She stared at the other woman. Just for the merest instant, she had to think. What was her name? “Lededje Y’breq,” she said, almost blurted. Of course.

“Thank you. I see.” Sensia looked up towards the mad tweeting coming from the little birds above. The noise stopped suddenly. A moment later both birds flew down, settled briefly on one of Sensia’s fingers and then darted off in different directions. “And you are from where exactly?”

Another nearly imperceptible delay. “Well, I… I’m of the Veppers retinue,” she said. Veppers, she thought. How odd to think of him without fear. It was as though all that was in another life, and one that she would not have to go back to. Even as she thought about it, turning it over in her mind, the idea still held no terror. She started trying to remember where she had been last, before she ended up here. It felt like something she’d been hiding from herself, like something that some other part of her had been keeping from her. “I was born in Ubruater City and brought up in the mansion house of the estate of Espersium,” she told Sensia. “Lately, I still generally live either in Ubruater, Espersium, or sometimes just wherever Mr. Veppers might be.”

Sensia was nodding, gaze distant. “Ah-hah!” she said, sitting back, smiling. “Ubruater City, Sichult, Quyn system, Ruprine Cluster, Arm One-one Near-tip.”

Lededje recognised “Quyn” as the name the Sun went by in the rest of the galaxy and she had heard the term “Ruprine Cluster” before. She had no idea what “Arm One-one Near-tip” was; this bit of the galaxy, she supposed.

“Where am I?” she asked as a small, thick-bottomed tray arrived, floating out from the room. It held glasses and a pitcher of pale green liquid with ice in it. The device lowered between them so that it effectively became a table.

Sensia poured their drinks. “Presently, literally,” she said, settling back again, swirling her drink, “you’re in a computational substrate node of the General Systems Vehicle Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly, which is currently travelling through the ’liavitzian Blister, in the region called God’s Ear, Rotational.”

Rather than fully catching all this, Lededje had been thinking. “‘Vehicle’?” she said. “Is that a Wheel, or…?” She took a drink. The pale green liquid was delicious, though probably non-alcoholic.

Sensia smiled uncertainly. “A Wheel?”

“You know; a Wheel,” Lededje said, and became aware they were now staring at the other with mutual incomprehension.

How could this woman not know what a Wheel was?

Then Sensia’s face brightened. “Ah, a Wheel! A specific thing, with a capital letter and so on. I see. Yes, sorry; got you now.” She looked away, seemingly distracted. “Oh, yes, fascinating things…” She shook her head. “But no, not a Wheel. Bit bigger than that. Plate-class General Systems Vehicle: getting on for a hundred kilometres long if you go tip-to-tip of the outer field structure and four klicks high measuring just the naked hull. Roughly six trillion tonnes, though the mass assay gets fiendishly complicated with so much exotic matter making up the engines. About a fifth of a billion people aboard right now.” She flashed a smile. “Not counting those in virtual environments.”

“What’s it called again?”

“The Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly.” Sensia shrugged. “Where I take my name from; Sensia. I’m a ship’s avatoid.”

“That sounds like a Culture ship,” Lededje said, feeling her skin warm suddenly.