Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  Most of his colleagues seemed to be discussing some pseudo-strategic detail of this particular environment that had long since ceased to interest him. He left them to it, retreating to his own musings and internalised visualisation.

  We’re losing, he thought again. There is a war in heaven and we are losing it.

  The war was amongst the Heavens, between the Afterlives, if you wanted to be pedantic about it. And it was over the Hells.

  “Vatueil? Captain Vatueil?”

  That was his name, but he wasn’t going to say anything back to them because he’d been told not to. He’d been ordered not to, and orders meant you had to do what you were told.

  “Can you hear me?”

  Yes, he could, but he still wouldn’t say anything.

  “Vatueil! Report! That’s a direct order!”

  That made him feel strange. If that was an order then he had to obey it. But then he had been ordered not to do anything that somebody else told him, not for now, not until A Superior got here who had the right codes. So that meant that what he had just heard wasn’t really an order at all. It was confusing.

  He wanted just not to listen to what they said. He could do that, he could shut off comms, but he needed to listen so he could track where they were. The confusion made a sort of hurt in him.

  He made the thing that he was in check its weapons again, counting rounds, measuring battery status, listening to the energy cells’ steady, reassuring hum and doing a systems-readiness check. That was better. Doing these things made him feel better. Doing these things made him feel good.

  “He can’t hear you.” That was a different voice, saying that.

  “The techs say he probably can. And he can probably hear you too, so watch what you say.”

  “Can’t we private channel?” (The different voice.)

  “No. We have to assume he can access them all too, so unless you want to bump helmets or use two cups and a string or something, watch what you say.”

  “Sheesh.” (The different voice.)

  He did not know what “Sheesh” meant.

  “Listen, Vatueil, this is Major Q’naywa. You know me. Come on now, Vatueil, you remember me.”

  He didn’t remember any Major Q’naywa. He didn’t remember very much, he guessed. There was a lot of stuff he felt ought to be there, somewhere, but which wasn’t. It gave him a feeling of emptiness. Like a magazine that should have been full of rounds because it was at the start of a deployment and it was supposed to be full, but which wasn’t.

  “Vatueil. Listen, son; you’ve got a problem. Your download didn’t complete. You’re in the unit but not all of you is in there, can you understand that? Come on, son, talk to me.”

  Part of him wanted to talk to the voice of Major Q’naywa, but he wasn’t going to. Major Q’naywa did not qualify as A Superior because his signal did not come with the codes that would tell him he really was talking to A Superior.

  “Some sort of sign, son. Come on. Anything.”

  He didn’t know what the codes were that would tell him he really was talking to A Superior, which seemed like an odd thing, but he was guessing that when he heard them he would know.

  “Vatueil, we know you transferred but we know it didn’t work properly. That’s why you’re firing on your own side, on us. You need to stop doing that. Do you understand?”

  He didn’t really understand. He sort of understood what they were saying because he knew each of the words and how they went together, but it didn’t make sense. He had to ignore it anyway because the people speaking the words did not have the right codes to be Superiors.

  He checked his weapons again.

  He sat/floated back, maintaining just enough embodiment to ensure long-term sanity, ignoring the shared display and instead watching the whole war blossom, expand and develop inside his mind, seeing it happen in fast-forward, time after time, his attention zooming in on different aspects of its progression with each iteration. It looked just like the sims, of course. Except at any given point after it had all started to go wrong the sims had always developed differently, better, more optimistically.

  Wars simmed in the Real did the same thing, naturally, but ultimately they were played out in the Real, in messy physical reality, and so didn’t seem to carry the same irony that this war did, because it – the real war, the conflict that actually mattered here, the war that would have continual and in a sense everlasting consequences – was itself a sim, but a sim that was itself easily as complicated and messy as anything in the Real. Still a sim, though, like the ones they’d used and were still using to plan the war.

  Just a bigger one. A bigger one that all concerned had agreed to treat as settling matters. Hence as real as these things ever got.

  That was the war they were losing, and that meant that if they were serious about what they had been trying to do – and were still trying to do – then they were going to have to think about cheating. And if cheating didn’t work, then – despite all the accords and laws and customs and regulations, despite all the agreements and solemn treaties – there was always the truly last resort: the Real.

  The ultimate cheating …How the hell did we get into this? he asked himself, though of course he already knew the answer. He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones.

  Nobody knew who had first developed the ability to transcribe a naturally evolved creature’s mind-state. Various species asserted that they or their ancestors had been the ones responsible, but few of the claims were credible and none convincing. It was a technology that had been around in some form for billions of years and it was continually being re-invented somewhere out amongst the ever-churning stew of matter, energy, information and life that was the greater galaxy.

  And continually being forgotten, too, of course; lost when ingénue civs were in the wrong place at the wrong time and copped a nearby gamma ray buster or a sudden visit from advanced unfriendlies. Other hopefuls accidentally – or by demented design – blew themselves up or poisoned themselves or their birthplace, or contrived some other usually highly avoidable catastrophe for themselves.

  No matter; whether you made it up all by yourself or got the makings from somebody else, once it was possible to copy a creature’s mind-state you could, as a rule, if you had the relevant background and the motivation, start to make at least part of your religion real.

  “Vatueil, we’re running out of time here, son. We need to come in there. You need to stand down, do you understand? You need to off-line your … let me just see here … your Aggressive Response, Target Acquisition and Weapon Deployment modules. Do you think you can do that? We don’t want to have to come in there and … we don’t want to have to come in there and treat you like an enemy.”

  “Sir.” (A different different voice. It was going to be easier to number them.) “Couldn’t be dead, could it?” (Different voice 2.)

  “Yeah. Maybe Xagao got it.” (Different voice 3.)

  “With his itsy carbine? With one from the half-clip he got off before it blew his fucking arm and both legs off? Have you seen the specs on this thing?” (Different voice 1.)

  “It isn’t dead. He isn’t dead. He’s there and he’s listening to everything we’re saying.”

  “Sir?” (Different voice 4.)

  “What?”

  “Xagao’s dead, sir.” (Different voice 4.)

  “Shit. Okay. Vatueil, listen; we’ve got one man dead out here. You understand that? You killed him, Vatueil. You dropped our TT and now you’ve killed one of us.” (TT stood for Troop Transport.) “Now, nobody’s going to punish you for this, we know it wasn’t your fault, but you have to stand down now before somebody else gets hurt. We don’t want to have to come in there and disable you ourselves.”

  “What? Are you fucking crazy? We’re seven suits against a fucking monster robot space tank piece of shit! We won’t have a hope in—” (Different
voice 1.)

  “Will you shut the fuck up? I’m not telling you again. One more word and you’re on a fucking charge. In fact, you are on a fucking charge. That thing can hear you, you fucking moron, and you just gave it our whole fucking status. If we do pile in, you’re now officially leading the fucking charge, genius.”

  “Fuck.” (Different voice 1 = Genius.)

  “Shut up. Vatueil?”

  Seven. There were seven of them. That was useful to know.

  Almost every developing species had a creation myth buried somewhere in its past, even if by the time they’d become space-faring it was no more than a quaint and dusty irrelevance (though, granted, some were downright embarrassing). Talking utter drivel about thunderclouds having sex with the sun, lonely old sadists inventing something to amuse themselves with, a big fish spawning the stars, planets, moons and your own ever-so-special People – or whatever other nonsense had wandered into the most likely feverish mind of the enthusiast who had come up with the idea in the first place – at least showed you were interested in trying provide an explanation for the world around you, and so was generally held to be a promising first step towards coming up with the belief system that provably worked and genuinely did produce miracles: reason, science and technology.

  The majority of species, too, could scrape together some sort of metaphysical framework, a form of earlier speculation – semi-deranged or otherwise – regarding the way things worked at a fundamental level which could later be held up as a philosophy, life-rule system or genuine religion, especially if one used the excuse that it was really only a metaphor, no matter how literally true it had declared itself to be originally.

  The harder the haul up the developmental ladder a species had suffered – rising from the usual primordial slime of just-dawned sentience with only (for example) the wheel to their name, to the dizzy heights and endless cheery sunshine of easy space flight, limitless energy, amusingly co-operative AIs, anti-ageing, anti-gravity, the end of disease and other cool tech – the more likely it was that that species would have entertained the idea of an immortal soul at some important point in its history and still be carrying the legacy of it now they had escaped the muck and had hit civilisational cruise phase.

  Most species capable of forming an opinion on the subject had a pretty high opinion of themselves, and most individuals in such species tended to think it was a matter of some considerable importance whether they personally survived or not. Faced with the inevitable struggles and iniquities attendant upon a primitive life, it could be argued that it was an either very gloomy, unimaginative, breathtakingly stoic or just plain dim species that didn’t come up with the idea that what could feel like an appallingly short, brutal and terrifying life was somehow not all there was to existence, and that a better one awaited them, personally and collectively – allowing for certain eligibility requirements – after death.

  So the idea of a soul – usually though not always immortal in its posited nature – was a relatively common piece of the doctrinal baggage accompanying a people just making their debut on the great galactic stage. Even if your civilisation had somehow grown up without the concept, it was kind of forced upon you once you had the means of recording the precise, dynamic state of someone’s mind and either placing it directly into the brain of another body, or storing it as some sort of scale-reduced – but still full – abstract inside an artificial substrate.

  “Vatueil? Captain Vatueil! I’m ordering you to reply! Vatueil; report status immediately!”

  He was listening but not paying attention. He kept checking his weapons and systems each time the voice that called itself Major Q’naywa said something that made him feel bad or confused.

  “Okay, we’re running out of time here and I sure as fuck am running out of patience.”

  What also made him feel good was looking out through the big curved entrance to the place where he was. The place where he was, where the thing that he was in was, measured 123.3 × 61.6 × 20.5 metres and was open to vacuum through the big curved entrance which formed one of the short walls. It was cluttered with machinery and pieces of equipment that he did not recognise but which he had quickly decided were No Threat, just useful for cover if he needed it.

  “We’re going to have to go in and do this the hard way.”

  “Oh fuck.” (Different voice 5.)

  “Beautiful. Perfect day for it.” (Different voice 6.)

  “We’re going to fucking die.” (Genius.)

  “Sir, can’t we wait for—?” (Different voice 2.)

  “We’re not going to fucking die. We haven’t the time to wait for any other fucker. Control yourselves, all of you. We do this ourselves. Remember all that training? This is what it was for.”

  “Wasn’t that much training, sir.” (Genius.)

  “I’m not even in the right sort of unit. I’m supposed to be in something called an N-C-M-E. I don’t even know what that means, frankly.” (Different voice 4.)

  “Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.” (Different voice 5.)

  “Maneen? Shut up, son. All of you, shut up.”

  “Sir.” (Different voice 5 = Maneen.)

  “Gulton, that thing of yours delete this motherfucker?”

  “Assuredly, sir. Thought you’d never ask, sir.” (Different voice 6 = Gulton.)

  The Unknowns – Treat As Enemy he could hear talking were all on the outside of the Abandoned Space Factory. The first one who had come in through the big curved entrance to the place where he was must have been Xagao, the one who was now dead.

  “Okay. We need a plan here. All of you; un-deploy back towards me until we’re LOS and we can use laser to talk without this piece of shit listening in.” (LOS meant Line Of Sight.)

  Xagao had silhouetted himself against the bit of the big bright blue and white planet visible beyond the curved entrance. Vatueil had targeted the silhouetted figure within a millisecond of the initial Visual Field Anomalous Movement impulse but he hadn’t Readied To Fire until the figure, moving slowly, had swept his weapon in his direction. Then he had sent an Identification Friend/Foe burst towards the figure and simultaneously flicked it with a laser ranging pulse.

  The figure had fired straight at him; small-calibre kinetic rounds. Approximately nine bullets had clanged into the Unidentified High-Solidity Object – Use As Cover he was hunkered down behind, two had hit his own Upper Weapon Nacelle 2 without significant damage and four or five flew overhead to hit the bulkhead behind him, producing more clangs he heard through his feet.

  He had fired back a six-burst from his right upper Light Laser Rifle Unit, registering a direct hit on the weapon he had been targeted by and two more on the lower body of the figure, which mostly flipped backwards into cover, though one part of it, identifiable as a human armoured suit leg, had gone spinning away by itself, spraying fluid, somersaulting rapidly as it headed out towards the bright blue and white planet visible through the big curved entrance.

  “Xagao get a TLF on the fucker?” (Different voice 3. TLF meant Target Location Fix.)

  “Yeah. Post it when we get LOS.” (Different voice 2.)

  He had felt good. Firing and hitting and removing a Threat made him feel good, and something about the spinning leg unit – the way it sailed away, its trajectory curving gradually as it went, before it eventually disappeared – made him feel good too.

  “Hey, it ping Xagao fore it tanked him? Anybody know?” (Genius.)

  “Hold on. Yup.” (Different voice 2.)

  “Shut up and get back here. If I can hear you, so can it.”

  “Sir.” (Different voice 2.)

  “That’s good though. The pinging. We can use that.” (Genius.)

  “IFFed him too.” (Different voice 2.)

  “Really? Chirpy.” (Genius.)

  He reviewed the brief engagement with Xagao and made two In-Deployment Tactical Environment Operating Behaviour Modification (Immediate Instigation) Memoranda: de-select automatic IFF challenge, de-select initial Laser Ran
ging Pulse.

  Especially once a species or civilisation started swapping ideas and tips with its galactic peers, it became fairly easy to do this mind copying and pasting stuff. As a result, an individual – always one favoured in some way, either revered or just well-off (once the tech was safely past the developmental stage) might serially or even concurrently inhabit several or indeed many different bodies.

  Some civs tried to use the technology purely as a back-up, going for full biological immortality with the soul-saving stuff just there in case something went badly wrong and you had to be transferred into a spare body. However, that tended to lead to shortterm trouble if they kept on breeding as they’d been used to, or to more subtle long-term problems if they kept their population growth so curtailed their society basically became stagnant.

  There was always the ever-tempting, profoundly illusory ideal – which every intelligent species seemed to think that only it had ever been clever enough to invent – of unlimited growth for ever, but any attempt to implement such a regime very rapidly ran into the awkward fact that the surrounding material in the galaxy and presumably the universe was already inhabited, used, claimed, protected, treasured or even by general agreement owned. The long-established result of this was the irritatingly strict rules the galactic community’s major players and Elders had come up with regarding the reasonable allotments of matter and living space a new species might expect (it boiled down to You Can’t Have Other People’s, but it always felt grossly unfair at the time). The seemingly wizard wheeze of turning the rest of the universe into teeny little copies of yourself was by no means a non-starter – ignorant people and vainglorious machines started doing it all the time – but it was invariably a quickly-brought-to-a-conclusioner.