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What it had discovered was an inflating shell of debris, drifting after it at
a tenth of its speed. It ran a rewind of the debris shell's expansion; it
originated at a point forty klicks behind the position where it had first
woken up, eighteen fifty-three milliseconds ago.
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Which implied it had been drifting totally unconscious for nearly half a
second.
Scary.
It scanned the distant shell of expanding particles. They'd been hot. Messy.
That was wreckage. Battle wreckage, even. The carbon and the ions could
originally have been part of itself, or part of the ship, or even part of a
human. A few molecules of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. No oxygen.
But all of it doing just 10% of its own velocity. Odd, that. As though it
had somehow been prioritised out of a sudden appearance of matter. Again, as
though it had been Displaced, perhaps.
The drone flicked part of its attention back inside, to the sealed cores in
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its mind substrate with their warning notices. Can't put this off any longer,
I suppose, it thought.
It interrogated the two cores.
PAST
, the first was labelled. The other one was simply called 2/2.
Uh-huh, it thought.
It opened the first core and found its memories.
II
Genar-Hofoen floated within the shower, buffeted from all sides by the streams
of water. The fans sucking the water back out of the AG shower chamber
sounded awfully loud this morning. Part of his brain told him he was running
short of oxygen; he'd either have to leave the shower or grope for the air
hose which was probably in the last place he'd feel for it. It was either
that or open his eyes. It all seemed too much bother. He was quite
comfortable where he was.
He waited to see what would give first.
It was his brain's indifference to the fact he was suffocating. Suddenly he
was wide awake and flailing around like some drowning basic-human, desperate
for breath but afraid to breathe in the constellation of water globules he was
floating within. His eyes were wide open. He saw the air hose and grabbed
it. He breathed in. Shit it was bright. His eyes dimmed the view. That was
better.
He felt he'd showered enough. He mumbled, 'Off, off,' into the air hose mask
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kept on coming. Then he remembered that the module wasn't talking to him
right now because he'd told the suit to accept no more communications last
night. Obviously such irresponsibility had to be punished by the module being
childish. He sighed.
Luckily the shower had an Off button. The water jets cut off. Gravity was
fed gently back into the chamber and he floated slowly down with the settling
blobs of water. A reverser field clicked on and he looked at himself in it
while the last of the water drained away, sucking in his belly and sticking
out his chin while he turned his face to the best angle and smoothed down a
few upstart locks of his blond curls.
'Well, I may feel like shit but I still look great,' he announced to nobody in
particular. For once, probably even the module wasn't listening.
'Sorry to force the pace,' the representation of his uncle Tishlin said.
''s all right,' he said through a mouthful of feyl steak. He washed it down
with some warmed-over infusion the module had always assured him was
beneficial when you hadn't had enough sleep. It tasted disgusting enough to
be either genuinely good for you, or just one of the module's little jokes.
'Sleep okay?' his uncle's image asked. He was, apparently, sitting across the
table from Genar-Hofoen in the module's dining room, a pleasantly airy space
filled with porcelain and flowers and boasting a seemingly real-time view on
three sides of a sunlit mountain valley, which in reality was half a galaxy
away. A small serving drone hovered near the wall behind the man.
'Good two hours,' Genar-Hofoen said. He supposed he could have stayed awake
the night before when he'd first discovered his uncle's hologram waiting for
him; he could have glanded something to keep him bright and awake and
receptive and got all this over with then, but he'd known he'd end up paying
for it eventually and besides, he wanted to show them that just because they'd
gone to the trouble of persuading his favourite uncle to record a
semantic-signal-mind-abstract-state or whatever the hell the module had called
it, he still wasn't going to jump just because they said so. The only
concession he'd made to all the urgency was deliberately not to dream; he had
a whole suite of pretty splendid dream-accessible scenarios going at the
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moment, several of them incorporating some powerfully good and satisfying sex,
and it was a positive sacrifice to miss out on any of them.
So he'd gone to bed and had a pretty good if maybe still not quite long enough
sleep and Uncle Tishlin's message had just had to sit twiddling its abstract
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module's AI core, waiting till he got up.
So far all they'd done was exchange a few pleasantries and talk a little about
old times; partly, of course, so that Genar-Hofoen could satisfy himself that
this apparition had genuinely been sent by his uncle and SC had paid him the
enormous compliment of sending not one but two personality-states to him in
order to argue him round to doing whatever it was they wanted from him (that
the hologram might be a brilliantly researched forgery created by SC would be
even more of a compliment& but that way lay paranoia).
'I take it you had a good evening,' Tishlin's simulation said.
'Enormous fun.'
Tishlin looked puzzled. Genar-Hofoen watched the expression form on his
uncle's face and wondered how comprehensive was the duplication of his uncle's
personality now encoded - living, if you wanted to look at it that way - in
the module's AI core. Did whatever was in there - sent here enciphered with
the specific task of persuading him to cooperate with Special Circumstances
-actually feel
? Or did it just appear to?
Shit, I must be feeling bad, Genar-Hofoen thought. I haven't bothered about
that sort of shit since university.
'How can you have enormous fun with& aliens?' the hologram asked, eyebrows
gathering.
'Attitude,' Genar-Hofoen said cryptically, slicing off more steak.
'But you can't drink with them, eat with them, can't really touch them, or
want the same things& ' Tishlin said, still frowning.
Genar-Hofoen shrugged. 'It's a kind of translation,' he said. 'You get used to
it.' He munched away for a moment while his uncle's program - or whatever it
was -
digested this. He pointed his knife at the image.
'That's something I'd want, in the unlikely event I agree to do whatever it is
they want me to do.'
'What?' Tishlin said, leaning back, arms crossed.
'I want to become an Affronter.'
Tishlin's eyebrows elevated. 'You want what
, boy?' he said.
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'Well, some of the time,' Genar-Hofoen said, half turning his head to the
drone behind him; the machine came quickly forward and refilled his glass with
the infusion. 'I mean, all I want is an Affronter body, one that I can just
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