“So,” she said, looking not at Sensia but out at the desert, “what is to become of me, Sensia?”
The older woman looked at her. “Become of you? You mean what happens now, where do you go?”
Still not daring to meet the other woman’s gaze, she nodded. “Yes.”
What a strange, almost absurd situation to be in, she thought. To be in this perfect but … self-confessed simulation, talking to a glorified computer about her fate, her life from this point on. What would happen next? Would she be left free to wander and somehow make a life within this virtual world? Would she be in some sense returned to Sichult, even to Veppers? Could she simply be turned off as just a program, nothing genuinely alive at all? The following few seconds, the next sentence out of Sensia’s unreal, virtually modelled mouth, would like as not turn her life one way or the other: to despair, to triumph, to outright annihilation. It all came down – unless she was already being deeply deceived about where she was and who she was really talking to – to what was said in the next moment.
Sensia blew her cheeks out. “Largely up to you, Lededje. You’re in a nearly unique situation so there’s no particular precedent, but zero documentation or not you’re essentially a fully functioning, viable independent mind-state and incontrovertibly sentient, with all that that implies regarding rights and so on.”
“What does that imply?” Lededje asked. She was already feeling relieved but she wanted to be sure.
Sensia grinned. “Only good things, really. The first thing I imagine you might want to do is to be revented.”
“What does that mean?”
“Technical term for being brought back to life in a physical body back in the Real.”
For all that she had no real heart or mouth, that all this was a simulation, she felt her heart leap, her mouth start to go dry. “That is possible?”
“Possible, advisable, kind of standard in such situations.” Sensia gave a sort of throttled-back laugh and waved out at the desert. As she swept her arm across the view, Lededje caught brief glimpses of what she guessed were other virtual worlds within or alongside this one: great gleaming cities, a mountain range at night criss-crossed with a tangle of tubes and lights, a vast ship or mobile city sailing on a creamy white sea beneath a cerulean sky, a limitless-looking vista of nothing but air full of vast striped trees like green-blue curlicues, and views and structures that she saw but could hardly have described, which she guessed were possible in a virtual reality but impractical in what Sensia blithely called the Real. Then the desert resumed. “You could stay here, of course,” Sensia told Lededje. “In whatever environment or mix of them you find congenial, but I’d expect you might want a real physical body.”
Lededje nodded. Her mouth was still dry. Could it really be this easy? “I think,” she said, “I would.”
“Sensible. There are, believe me, innumerable other things you could be revented into, in theory, but if I were you I’d stick with the form you’re used to, at first at least. Context is everything, and the first context we find ourselves in is that of our own body.” She looked Lededje down and up. “You happy with the way you look now?”
Lededje opened the blue robe she still wore, looked down at herself. She closed the robe again. Its hems fluttered in the hot breeze. “Yes.” She hesitated. “I can’t decide if I want some form of tattoo or not.”
“Easy to add later, though not at the genetic level you’ve been used to. Can’t really sort you out with that. That info didn’t travel.” Sensia shrugged. “I’ll leave you with an image you can manipulate until you’re happy with it, take a spec from that.”
“You’ll grow a body for me?”
“Complete a suspended one.”
“How long will that take?”
“Here, as little or as much time as you like. In the Real, about eight days.” Sensia shrugged again. “My standard stock of mindless bods doesn’t include the Sichultian form – sorry.”
“Is there a body I could be put into now, without waiting?”
Sensia smiled. “Can’t wait, eh?”
Lededje shook her head, felt her skin grow warm. The truth was that if this was some cruel joke, she wanted to know as quickly as possible. If it was all genuine then she didn’t want to wait to have a real body to take her back to Sichult.
“It’ll still take about a day or so,” Sensia said. She nodded at a female human figure suddenly suspended in the air in front of them; naked, eyes closed. It looked vaguely Sichultian. Its skin was a sort of muddy grey. Then it changed to pure black, then to near white, then shifted through a modest spectrum of different colours. At the same time the girth and height of the figure increased and then decreased. The shape of the head and the facial features changed a little too. “That’s the parameters you can play with, given the time available,” Sensia told her.