Veppers looked at Sulbazghi. “Are you saying,” he said slowly, “that the girl had a neural lace in her head?”
That shouldn’t be possible. Neural laces were illegal for Sichultians. Great God, fucking drug glands were illegal for Sichultians.
“Kind of looks like it,” Sulbazghi said.
“And it never showed up?” Veppers asked. He stared at the doctor. “Sulbazghi, You must have scanned that girl a hundred times.”
“They don’t show up using the equipment we’ve got to look with,” Sulbazghi said. He stared down at the thing in his hand, gave a tiny, despairing laugh. “Minor miracle we can see it with the naked eye.”
“Who put it in her?” Veppers asked. “The clinicians?”
Sulbazghi shook his head. “Impossible.”
“Then who?”
“I’ve done a quick bit of investigating since the doctor told me about this,” Jasken said. “We need help here, sir: somebody who properly knows about this sort of thing—”
“Xingre,” Sulbazghi said. “He’ll know, or know better how to find out.”
“Xingre?” Veppers said, frowning. The Jhlupian trader and honorary consul was his principal contact with the alien civilisation the Enablement was closest to. Jasken had a sour look on his face that Veppers recognised; it meant he was having to agree with Sulbazghi. Both men knew this had to be kept as quiet as possible. Why were they suggesting bringing the alien into this?
“He, she or it might know,” Jasken said. “The point is it’ll be able to find out if this thing really is what it looks like.”
“And what the fuck does it look like?” Veppers asked.
Jasken took a deep breath. “Well, like a … a neural lace device, the sort of thing the so-called ‘Culture’ uses.” He grimaced. Veppers saw the man grind his teeth for a moment. “It’s hard to tell; it could be a fake. With our technology—”
“Why would anyone go to this trouble to fake it?” Sulbazghi said angrily. Veppers held up one hand to quiet him.
Jasken glared at the doctor but went on, “It isn’t possible to be sure, which is why we might need Xingre and the sort of analysis and diagnostic equipment he has access to, but it looks like this thing is one of their devices. A Culture device.”
Veppers looked at them both in turn.
“It’s a Culture device?” he asked. He held out his hand and let Sulbazghi tip the thing into his palm. The closer he looked, the more tiny, still finer filaments he could see, branching and re-branching off the main, already very thin wires. It felt amazingly soft. It weighed next to nothing.
“Looks very likely,” the doctor agreed.
Veppers bounced the thing up and down in his hand a couple of times; a handful of hair would have weighed more. “Okay,” he said. “But what does this mean? I mean, she wasn’t a Culture citizen or anything, was she?”
“No,” Sulbazghi said.
“And … she didn’t seem to be able to interface with any equipment … ?” Veppers looked from the doctor to Jasken, who was now standing with his Oculenses dangling, the arm in the cast folded across his chest, his other arm resting on it, hand stroking the skin around his mouth repeatedly. He was still frowning.
“No,” Sulbazghi said again. “She might not even have known the thing was in there.”
“What?” Veppers said. “But how?”
“These things grow inside you,” Jasken said. “If it really is one then it’ll have started as a seed and grown all around and into her brain. Fully developed these things link with just about every brain cell, every synapse.”
“Why didn’t she have a head the size of a basket fruit?” Veppers asked. He grinned but neither man responded. That was very unusual. And not a good sign.
“These things add less than half a per cent to the bulk of the brain,” Jasken said. He nodded at the thing lying in Veppers’ palm. “Even what you see there is mostly hollow; in the brain it’d be filled with fluid or bits of the brain itself. The tiniest filaments are so thin they’re invisible to the naked eye and they’ll probably have been burned off in the furnace anyway.”
Veppers stared at the strange, insignificant-looking device. “But what was it in her brain to do?” he asked both men. “What was it for? Given that we’ve established it didn’t seem to give her any super powers or anything.”
“These things are used to record a person’s mind-state,” Jasken said.
“Their soul, for want of a better word,” Sulbazghi said.