Worth a try. I appreciate you making the point about leaning towards Yes even though the vote was already lost.
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Least I could do. Maybe thoughts will change with subsequent developments and we might vote again.
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I shall cling to that filament.
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xLOU
oMSV
“Pointedly symbolic”! What gibberish. And our group coordinator is “listing”.
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That was “leaning”, as well you know.
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Still off-kilter.
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Perhaps some of our colleagues worry we are starting to indulge in group-think, and to obsess.
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We are a group of Minds. Thinking is what we do. And obsession is just what those too timorous to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion call determination.
However, they’re still aboard, even if they might be sitting fretting in the lifeboats. Unlike the completely overboard idiocy of this “Hybrid OS” abomination.
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First I’d heard of
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To do it? Who knows. But we know what possesses it now. The Zihdren- Remnanter.
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If this marks the start of a new, fashionable trend amongst ship Minds, I may Sublime myself shortly.
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Still, might yet yield advantage. Never mind the denials. Any sort of more direct link to the Z-R than we’ve been used to until now implies better access to the Z within the Enfold. An opportunity.
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Uh-huh. We’ll see. Makes the
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I think there’s a reason there are so few of the Scree class, despite the fact they’re the smallest, energy-cheapest to build of all the Contact Units. Five humans is just too small a crew; they’re almost guaranteed to go a bit mad. It’s like the opposite of being outnumbered; the more humans you have aboard you, the better their eccentricities average out and you’re left with something easy to model, anticipate and influence. You have safety in their numbers. Five bios and one Mind, in one teeny wee ship? Their basic insanity is going to manifest. And it’s reality-distorting; infectious, practically. Always going to end badly.
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Yes, but you can always kick a human crew off at the next GSV if you
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The Culture had a problem with the rump of the Zihdren civilisation that the Zihdren-Remnanters represented. It was the same problem they had with most other light-basking species. The whole comms and data network of such beings was not something truly independent of them as creatures; instead it was effectively an extension of them as a mass of interconnected individuals, and so the Culture, with its self-imposed embargo on reading the minds of other beings, regarded it as immoral to investigate even aspects of the Remnanters’ existence as seemingly impersonal and banal as their data reservoirs without specific permission, something that had, to date at least, rarely been forthcoming.
It meant that the Remnanters were slightly mysterious as far as the Culture was concerned; they were less than perfectly known and understood, they were incompletely assessed, intrinsically beyond certain very useful forms of analysis, proof against being properly simmed and so, in theory, capable of surprising the Culture. This was a devilishly itchy, annoying thing for your average Mind — had there even been such a thing — to have to address.
It was just as well that the Remnanters were little more than a civilisational after-thought, an only-visible- at-high-magnification detail on the vast, ever-changing galactic map, and that — at least for now — there were only a few other similar species making any ripples in the big shared paddling pond of the big G; imagine — so went a popular nightmare scenario for ships of a certain disposition who worried about this sort of stuff — having to cope with the Zihdren themselves when they’d been in their pomp!
On the other hand there were species/civs with no such compunctions who regularly investigated as deeply as possible into the minds of others — especially when they were as weird as the Remnanters — and would cheerfully share the information with anybody who asked.
As long as no favours were promised in return, the Culture would — reluctantly, even a little guiltily — use that kind of information, just to keep from being too embarrassingly ignorant.
Scoaliera Tefwe woke slowly, as she had woken slowly a few dozen times, over the intervening centuries.
Only it wasn’t really waking slowly; she was being woken.
All dark at first. Stillness and silence too, and yet the sensation that things were happening, both inside her head and body; organs and systems and faculties being woken, revived, checked, primed, readied.
It was at once reassuring and somehow disappointing.
She was sort of expecting to see the word SIMULATION, however briefly, but it wasn’t there. She blinked, looked around.
She was floating in some sort of suspensor field, in air, in a human or humanoid body dressed in some clingy but lightly puffed cover-all which left only her feet, hands and head exposed. She was held reclined in the air. It was as though she was sitting in an invisible chair. A boxy ship drone was at eye-level, looking at her. The room around her appeared to be medical unit standard.
“Ms Tefwe?” the drone said.
“Reporting,” she said. She looked at her hand. It looked like her hand, though she knew enough to know that meant almost nothing. “A reverser field, please?”
The drone put a screen in front of her, showing her her own face. She touched the skin on her cheek, pressed her nose one way then the other. Looked like her face.
She remembered talking with the avatoid of the
She had stayed with it for a couple of days, calling in a supply drop from the Orbital’s Hub to feed and water the animal at the end of that first day.
The VFP had been annoyed at her dallying but had not zapped her back to it without permission. The
