Surface Detail(30)

Now they stood outside a more modest single-storey dwelling of white-painted mud brick whose prospect was of a leafy little oasis in a great duned desert of sable sand spreading as far as the eye could see. Colourful tents stood around pools and little streams, shadowed by tall, red-leafed trees.

“Make there be children,” she’d said, and there they were; a dozen or so, all laughing and splashing in one of the shallow pools, oblivious to the two women watching them from the mud brick house on its slight rise.

Sensia had suggested they sit down before she opened up Lededje’s memories of the last few days and hours of her life. They had sat on a rug on a wooden platform in front of the house while she recalled with mounting horror the events leading up to her death. There had been the usual flier journey from the estate to the capital, full of stomach-churning swoops and zooms as Veppers enjoyed himself, then on arrival she had settled into her room in the town house – another mansion in all but name in the centre of the city – then she’d slipped away from a visit to a couturier, gouging from her left heel the tracer implant she’d discovered was there some months ago. She’d picked up some pre-prepared clothes, makeup and effects and gone on the run within the city streets and alleys, finally finding herself cornered in the opera house.

The way Sensia had let her experience it, it was more like watching it all happen to somebody else, on a stage or in a film; she had been spared the outright immediacy of it all in that first run-through, though she could choose to go back and inspect the detail of it if she wanted. She had chosen to do this. She was doing it again now. She winced once more.

Lededje had stood again, the shock of it over. Sensia stood at her side.

“So I’m dead?” she said, still not fully comprehending.

“Well,” Sensia said, “obviously not so dead you can’t ask that question, but, technically; yes.”

“How did I get here? Was it via this entanglement thing?”

“Yes. There must have been a sort of neural lace inside your head, entangled with the legacy system I inherited from the relevant ship.”

“What relevant ship?”

“Let’s come back to that.”

“And what fucking neural lace inside my head?” she demanded. “I didn’t have one!”

“You must have. The only alternative would have been somebody positioning some sort of neural induction device round your head and reading your mind-state that way, as you slipped away. But that’s very doubtful. Not the sort of tech you have yourselves—”

“We have aliens,” Lededje protested. “Especially in Ubruater – it’s the capital of the planet, the whole system, the whole Enablement. Alien embassies; aliens running around all over the place. They’d have the tech.”

“Indeed they might, but why would they code your brain state and transmit it across three and a half thousand light years to a Culture ship, without documentation? Also, just plopping an induction helmet, no matter how sophisticated, onto a dying person in the last few seconds of their life could never record a mind state as detailed and internally consistent as yours. Even in a prime equiv-tech medical environment with plenty of prep time and a stable subject you’d never capture the fine detail you’ve come equipped with. A full back-up-capable neural lace grows with the brain it’s part of, it beds in over the years, gets very adept at mirroring every detail of the mind it interpenetrates and co -exists with. That’s what you pretty much must have had. Plus it had an entanglement facility built into it, obviously.”

She glared at Sensia. “So I’m … complete? A perfect copy?”

“Impossible to be absolutely sure, but I strongly suspect so. There is almost certainly less of a difference between the you that died and the you that you are now than there would be between your selves at one end of a night’s sleep and the other.”

“And that’s thanks to this entanglement thing too?”

“Partly. The copies at either end of the process should be absolutely identical, assuming the non-originating part of the pair collapses at all.”

“What?”

“Entanglement is great when it works but – more than two per cent of the time – it doesn’t work; in fact it fails utterly. That’s why it’s almost never used – hideously risky. You use it in wartime, when it’s better than nothing, and possibly a few SC agents have been subject to the process, but, otherwise, never.”

“Still, the odds were in my favour.”

“Assuredly. And it’s better than being dead.” Sensia paused. “Though this still doesn’t answer the question regarding how you ended up with a full back-up-capable neural lace in your head complete with an entanglement facility targeted to a long passedon legacy sub-system which all concerned had quite thoroughly forgotten about.” Sensia turned, looked at Lededje. “You’re frowning.”