Surface Detail (17 page)

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 Ranging 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.

Normally, especially given how much amazingly rich experience could be crammed into VRs in general and Afterlives in particular, people went with more modest and neighbourly growth plans in the Real and an extensive though still ultimately limited expansion program in the Virtual.

Because, particularly for those just developing the relevant soul-saving tech, that life in virtual environments beckoned seductively. Deeply immersive and impressive VR was an effectively inevitable adjunct to mind-state transcription technology even if, bizarrely, it hadn’t come into existence before. Each led to and complemented the other.

Only a few species didn’t bother with the soul-transference side at all, some because thanks to their heritage and development they already had something as good or which they judged made it irrelevant, some for specifically religious or philosophical reasons, and some – most – because they were more interested in going for full immortality in the Real and regarded mind-state transcription as a distraction, or even an admission of defeat.

Of course, in any society using this soul-transcription gizmology there was usually a die-hard strand of true believers who insisted that the only afterlife worth bothering about still happened somewhere else, in the true heaven or hell that had always been believed in before all this fangling technology came along, but that was a tough position to hold when at the back of your mind was the niggling doubt that you really might not be saved when the time came, while at the back of everybody else’s mind was a little device that was guaranteed to do precisely that.

The result was that many, many civilisations in the greater galaxy had their own Afterlives: virtual realities maintained in computational or other substrates to which their dead could go and – in some sense at least – live on.

“I can see you now, sir.” (Maneen.)

“Well, space biscuits for you, marine. Switch to LOS.”

“Sir. Sorry. I mean—” (Maneen.)

There was silence for a while. Vatueil watched the big section of bright blue and white planet he could see beyond the curved entrance. The Unknowns – Treat As Enemy were keeping quiet.

The bit of the planet he could see was changing very slowly all the time. He went back and replayed how it had changed since he’d taken up position here. He subtracted the motion component of the place where he was. The place where he was was revolving too but it was revolving slowly and steadily and that made it easy to subtract.

Now he could see that the planet was slowly revolving. Also, the white streaks and whorls which over-lay the blue were changing too, even more slowly. Some of the streaks were widening and some were narrowing and the whorls were spinning about their axes and also shifting across the face of the planet, even allowing for its revolving.

He watched the replay of all this movement many times. It made him feel good. It was different from the way checking his weapons made him feel good. It was like the way watching Xagao’s leg going tumbling off towards the planet had made him feel good. Especially the way its trajectory had curved. It was beautiful.

Beautiful. He thought about this word and decided that it was the right word.

Some Afterlives simply offered everlasting fun for the post-dead: infinite holiday resorts featuring boundless sex, adventure, sport, games, study, exploration, shopping, hunting or whatever other activities especially tickled that particular species’ fancy. Others were as much for the benefit of those still living as the dead themselves, providing societies that had inherited or recently come up with the idea of consulting the ancestors with a practical way of doing just that.

A few were of a more contemplative and philosophic nature than those fixated on general hilarity. Some – and the majority of the more long-established Afterlives – featured a sort of gradual fading-away rather than genuine post-death VR immortality, with the personality of the deceased individual slowly – usually over many generations of time in the Real – dissolving into the general mass of information and civilisational ethos held within the virtual environment.

In some the dead lived much more quickly than those in the Real, in others they lived at the same rate and in others far more slowly. Some even incorporated ways to bring favoured dead individuals back to life again.

And many still featured death; a second, final, absolute death, even within the virtual, because – as it turned out – it was quite a rare species that naturally generated individuals capable of being able, or wanting, to live indefinitely, and those who had lived for a really long time in Afterlives were prone to becoming profoundly, gravely bored, or going catatonically – or screaming – mad. Civs new to the game often went into a sort of shock when the first desperate pleas for true, real death started to emerge from their expensively created, painstakingly maintained, assiduously protected and carefully backed-up Afterlives.

The trick was to treat such entreaties as perfectly natural.

And to let the dead have their way.

He wanted to stay and watch the view of the planet beyond the curved entrance for much longer so that he could see how the whorls and streaks continued to change. Then he could replay the recording again and again. Seeing even more of the planet would be good too. It would be better. Seeing all of the planet would be better still. It would be best.

He realised that he was starting to feel uncomfortable. He wasn’t sure what the cause was at first, then understood that it was because he had stayed too long in the one place after a Recent Combat Event.

He thought about what to do. Nothing had changed or moved recently. It should be safe to move.

He tried asking his Outboard Remote Sensing/Engagement Units what they could sense, but he still didn’t have any of these units. He was supposed to have these things, whatever they were, but he didn’t. It was like another empty magazine that was supposed to be full.

So: Proceed Otherwise. He rose silently on his three articulated legs, senses sweeping all around as his Upper Sensory Dome rose into the space beneath the ceiling (clearance overhead duly reduced from 18.3 to 14.2 metres) and gave him an increased field of view. He kept both Main Weapon Nacelles targeted at the curved entrance. All six Secondary Weapon Pods deployed to cover the rest of the area about him, without him needing to tell them to. He rotated the Upper Weapon Collar to point Nacelle 2 directly behind him, where he judged the least risk was, as it had expended some energy and taken some damage, however nominal.

Still nothing threatening to be sensed. He stepped over the Unidentified High-Solidity Object and moved right and forward, towards the side of the curved entrance that showed the bright blue and white planet. He was moving quietly, at less than optimum speed, so that when his feet connected with the deck they produced minimal vibration. A tipped section of the floor near a long ragged tear in the thick deck material meant that he had to use his weapon pods to balance himself.

Some of the Unidentified Medium-Solidity Objects in the space about him resolved into space- and atmosphere-capable craft. This meant that the place where he was was a hangar. Most of the craft looked chaotically asymmetric, damaged, non-viable.

He could see another Unidentified High-Solidity Object nearer the curved entrance. He moved towards it. The view of the planet became more extensive and made him feel good. Beautiful. It was still beautiful.

Suddenly something moved against the bright white and blue of the planet.

Nobody knew, either, what bright little soul had first hit on the idea of linking up two Afterlives, but given that emerging civilisations were generally quite keen to establish permanent, high-capacity, high-quality and preferably free links with the dataspheres and informational environments of those around them – especially those around them with better tech than they possessed – it had always been going to happen, by accident if not by design. It even benefited the dead of both civilisations, opening up additional new vistas of exciting post-death exper ience, the better for the deceased to resist the regrettable attraction of a second, properly terminal event.

Linking up all amenable and compatible Afterlives had become something of a craze; almost before the relevant academics could come up with a decent provisional analysis of the phenomenon’s true cultural meaning and implications, practically every corner of the civilised galaxy was linked to every other part by Afterlife connections, as well as by all the other more usual ties of diplomacy, tourism, trade, general nosiness and so on.

So, for many millions of years there had been a network of Afterlives throughout the galaxy, semi-independent from the Real and constantly changing just as the galactic community in the Real changed, with civilisations appearing, developing, steady-stating or disappearing, either changing beyond recognition, relapsing in some way or going for semi-Godhood, sidestepping the material life altogether by opting for the careless indifference that was Subliming.

Mostly, nobody mentioned the Hells.

The moving thing was tiny. Too small to be a person in a suit or even an Outboard Remote Sensing/Engagement Unit, either his or anybody else’s. It was moving at 38.93 metres per second and so was far too slow to be considered kinetic ordinance. It was approximately 3cm by 11cm, round in section, conical aspect to the leading quarter, spinning. He deemed it to be a 32mm mortar shell. He had a lot of high-reliability information on such ordnance. Maximum capability a five kiloton micro-nuke; many variants. It was going to fly directly above where he had been positioned and impact on the bulkhead which had been behind him.

Now his high-telescopic vision apparatus had acquired it, he could see tiny sensory pits on the thing, blurring round as it rotated

(4.2 rps). It flew past him five metres away and started to glitter, giving off range- and Combat Space Topography-sensing laser pulses. None hit him. This was because it had gone past before it activated.

He was still moving, taking one more quiet step as the projectile sailed through the dark space of the hangar. He judged that the ingress of the round meant that an attack might be about to start and that his best choice had become to hunker down here, still five steps away from the Unidentified High-Solidity Object he’d been heading for, opting instead for the partial cover of the nearest Unidentified Medium-Solidity Object, an additional advantage accruing from the fact that a sub-routine assured him his scale and overall shape in hunkered mode would make him look similar to the now Identified Medium-Solidity Object concerned, which was a small, intact but deactivated High-Atmospheric/Low Orbit Planetary Surface Bombardment Unit.

An additional advantage accruing definitely sounded like a good thing. It was almost like an order from inside himself. He’d choose that option. He started hunkering down.