display and instead watching the whole war blossom, expand and develop inside his mind, seeing it happen in fast-forward, time after time, his attention zooming in on different aspects of its progression with each iteration. It looked just like the sims, of course. Except at any given point after it had all started to go wrong the sims had always developed differently, better, more optimistically.
Wars simmed in the Real did the same thing, naturally, but ultimately they were played out in the Real, in messy physical reality, and so didn’t seem to carry the same irony that this war did, because it — the real war, the conflict that actually mattered here, the war that would have continual and in a sense everlasting consequences — was itself a sim, but a sim that was itself easily as complicated and messy as anything in the Real. Still a sim, though, like the ones they’d used and were still using to plan the war.
Just a bigger one. A bigger one that all concerned had agreed to treat as settling matters. Hence as real as these things ever got.
That was the war they were losing, and that meant that if they were serious about what they had been trying to do — and were still trying to do — then they were going to have to think about cheating. And if cheating didn’t work, then — despite all the accords and laws and customs and regulations, despite all the agreements and solemn treaties — there was always the truly last resort: the Real.
The ultimate cheating…
Nobody knew who had first developed the ability to transcribe a naturally evolved creature’s mind-state. Various species asserted that they or their ancestors had been the ones responsible, but few of the claims were credible and none convincing. It was a technology that had been around in some form for billions of years and it was continually being re-invented somewhere out amongst the ever-churning stew of matter, energy, information and life that was the greater galaxy.
And continually being forgotten, too, of course; lost when ingenue civs were in the wrong place at the wrong time and copped a nearby gamma ray buster or a sudden visit from advanced unfriendlies. Other hopefuls accidentally — or by demented design — blew themselves up or poisoned themselves or their birthplace, or contrived some other usually highly avoidable catastrophe for themselves.
No matter; whether you made it up all by yourself or got the makings from somebody else, once it was possible to copy a creature’s mind-state you could, as a rule, if you had the relevant background and the motivation, start to make at least part of your religion real.
“Vatueil, we’re running out of time here, son. We need to come in there. You need to stand down, do you understand? You need to off-line your… let me just see here… your Aggressive Response, Target Acquisition and Weapon Deployment modules. Do you think you can do that? We don’t want to have to come in there and… we don’t want to have to come in there and treat you like an enemy.”
“Sir.” (A different different voice. It was going to be easier to number them.) “Couldn’t be dead, could it?” (Different voice 2.)
“Yeah. Maybe Xagao got it.” (Different voice 3.)
“With his itsy carbine? With one from the half-clip he got off before it blew his fucking arm and both legs off? Have you
“It isn’t dead. He isn’t dead. He’s there and he’s listening to everything we’re saying.”
“Sir?” (Different voice 4.)
“What?”
“Xagao’s dead, sir.” (Different voice 4.)
“Shit. Okay. Vatueil, listen; we’ve got one man dead out here. You understand that? You killed him, Vatueil. You dropped our TT and now you’ve killed one of us.” (TT stood for Troop Transport.) “Now, nobody’s going to punish you for this, we know it wasn’t your fault, but you have to stand down now before somebody else gets hurt. We don’t want to have to come in there and disable you ourselves.”
“What? Are you fucking crazy? We’re seven suits against a fucking monster robot space tank piece of shit! We won’t have a hope in—” (Different voice 1.)
“Will you shut the fuck up? I’m not telling you again. One more word and you’re on a fucking charge. In fact, you
“Fuck.” (Different voice 1 = Genius.)
“Shut up. Vatueil?”
Seven. There were seven of them. That was useful to know.
Almost every developing species had a creation myth buried somewhere in its past, even if by the time they’d become space-faring it was no more than a quaint and dusty irrelevance (though, granted, some were downright embarrassing). Talking utter drivel about thunderclouds having sex with the sun, lonely old sadists inventing something to amuse themselves with, a big fish spawning the stars, planets, moons and your own ever- so-special People — or whatever other nonsense had wandered into the most likely feverish mind of the enthusiast who had come up with the idea in the first place — at least showed you were interested in trying provide an explanation for the world around you, and so was generally held to be a promising first step towards coming up with the belief system that provably worked and genuinely did produce miracles: reason, science and technology.
The majority of species, too, could scrape together some sort of metaphysical framework, a form of earlier speculation — semi-deranged or otherwise — regarding the way things worked at a fundamental level which could later be held up as a philosophy, life-rule system or genuine religion, especially if one used the excuse that it was really only a metaphor, no matter how literally true it had declared itself to be originally.
The harder the haul up the developmental ladder a species had suffered — rising from the usual primordial slime of just-dawned sentience with only (for example) the wheel to their name, to the dizzy heights and endless cheery sunshine of easy space flight, limitless energy, amusingly co-operative AIs, anti-ageing, anti-gravity, the end of disease and other cool tech — the more likely it was that that species would have entertained the idea of an immortal soul at some important point in its history and still be carrying the legacy of it now they had escaped the muck and had hit civilisational cruise phase.
Most species capable of forming an opinion on the subject had a pretty high opinion of themselves, and most individuals in such species tended to think it was a matter of some considerable importance whether they personally survived or not. Faced with the inevitable struggles and iniquities attendant upon a primitive life, it could be argued that it was an either very gloomy, unimaginative, breathtakingly stoic or just plain dim species that didn’t come up with the idea that what could feel like an appallingly short, brutal and terrifying life was somehow not all there was to existence, and that a better one awaited them, personally and collectively — allowing for certain eligibility requirements — after death.
So the idea of a soul — usually though not always immortal in its posited nature — was a relatively common piece of the doctrinal baggage accompanying a people just making their debut on the great galactic stage. Even if your civilisation had somehow grown up without the concept, it was kind of forced upon you once you had the means of recording the precise, dynamic state of someone’s mind and either placing it directly into the brain of another body, or storing it as some sort of scale-reduced — but still full — abstract inside an artificial substrate.
“Vatueil? Captain Vatueil! I’m ordering you to reply! Vatueil; report status immediately!”
He was listening but not paying attention. He kept checking his weapons and systems each time the voice that called itself Major Q’naywa said something that made him feel bad or confused.
“Okay, we’re running out of time here and I sure as fuck am running out of patience.”
What also made him feel good was looking out through the big curved entrance to the place where he was. The place where he was, where the thing that he was in was, measured 123.3 ? 61.6 ? 20.5 metres and was open to vacuum through the big curved entrance which formed one of the short walls. It was cluttered with machinery and pieces of equipment that he did not recognise but which he had quickly decided were No Threat, just useful for cover if he needed it.
