Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  “Stopped at my neck,” she called out.

  “That’s standard,” Demeisen shouted back. “It’ll go complete if there’s any threat or if you tell it to.”

  “How do I tell it to?”

  “Saying ‘Helmet up,’ or just ‘Eek!’ usually works, I’m told.”

  “It’s … intelligent?” she said. It came out closer to a screech than she’d intended.

  “Dumber than a knife missile,” the avatar told her, sounding amused. “But it recognises speech and it can hold a conversation. Thing’s supposed to react to perceived threat even when you’re asleep, Led. Can’t be totally stupid.”

  Her eyes went wide and she sucked in a breath. She felt herself rise on her tiptoes. “It’s also just given me what feels like a buttplug and a pessary,” she said, aware that her voice had risen a couple of tones. “That had better be entirely fucking standard.”

  “Yup. You can adjust that too. For all that stuff you can talk to it or use the controls on either forearm, or the finger pads; just like the tattoo. Got colouring and camo functions; you can use them to give it modesty panels if you’re shy.”

  She looked at herself in the reverser. The gel suit didn’t even reflect the way she’d have expected it to. She could still see the tat; it was almost like the gel suit wasn’t there at all except at the edges of her body as they appeared in the image, where it looked like she had a thin grey line drawn right round her.

  “So it can talk?” she shouted.

  “Mm-hmm,” the avatar replied.

  “You going to introduce us then?” she asked. “Seems only right,” she muttered.

  “It was being polite, waiting to be spoken to,” Demeisen said. “Say hello, suit.”

  “Hello,” the suit said, making her jump. The smooth, cool, androgynous voice came from just under each of her ears.

  “Well, hello,” she said, and realised she was smiling like an idiot.

  “Ms. Y’breq, I understand?” the suit said.

  “Hello there!” she said, probably louder and more heartily than was strictly necessary.

  “May I suggest I introduce minor filaments into your ears to allow me to speak to you directly?”

  “That necessary?” she said. She found she was whispering for some reason.

  “It is preferable,” the suit said. “The collar components are already able to comprehend sub-vocalisations. This means we may converse without appearing to.”

  “Right,” she said. “Okay then.” There was a pause. She didn’t feel anything happening, then felt a brief, tiny tickling feeling inside both ears. “That it?” she asked.

  “Yes,” the suit voice said, sounding slightly different. “Testing: left, right,” it said, the source of its voice shifting appropriately before centring in her head again. “Does that sound correct to you?”

  “I suppose,” she said. Another pause.

  “No, couldn’t hear a thing, suit,” Demeisen said.

  Lededje took a breath. “Suit, put the helmet up, please.”

  The helmet component flipped up over her head almost before the last syllable had been uttered, unrolling from the neck ruff with a whoosh of air.

  She was aware there was something around her head but she could still see perfectly well, and she could blink. She put her fingers tentatively up to her eyes and found what felt like invisible bulges over each eye. She flexed her jaw, stuck out her tongue; a shallow bulge had opened over her mouth and extended outwards when she stuck her tongue out. Her nose had tiny bulges under each nostril. “What am I breathing?” she asked quietly.

  “Air, I imagine,” the avatar shouted.

  “Ambient air,” the suit told her. “I am charging back-unit components with pressurised ambient air as a precaution; however, for long-term use I can continually reconstitute oxygen from carbon dioxide with my reactor.”

  “Reactor?” Lededje said, slightly alarmed.

  “Chemical processing reactor,” the suit told her.

  “Ah.”

  “Oh, it’s got what you’d think of as a real reactor too,” Demeisen shouted. She got the impression he was enjoying all this.

  “A standard micro-form M/AM unit,” the suit told her.

  Lededje rolled her eyes. “Helmet down.” she said. The helmet flipped instantly back to become a neck ruff again. “Can you go all black?” she said.

  The suit turned matt black. “Now make the bit over the tat controls go transparent.” The area over her left forearm went transparent again. Touching there, it felt like the suit surface under the pads of her fingers had gone sub-millimetre thin, allowing her almost full sensitivity. She dialled the tat lines to thick and her face darkened. Satisfied, she marched out of the bathroom.

  “All right,” she said. “I’m suited up. Now what—?” She stopped a couple of steps from the seats. “What the fuck is—?” she started to say, then said, “Oh, the armoured bit.” Sitting in the shuttle’s middle seat was what looked like an armoured warrior. The suit was mirror-shiny and smooth; maybe three or four times as thick as the gel suit. The head section looked like a blank-visored silver version of the sort of thing you were meant to wear riding a motor bike.

  “The armoured bit,” Demeisen agreed. He glanced at her. “Very fetching,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.” She sat in her seat again. The image on the screen looked just the same as before, disappointingly. “Now what?” she said.

  “Now you get into the armoured suit,” the avatar said.

  She looked at Demeisen.

  “Just a precaution,” he said, waving his arms.

  She got up. The armoured suit rose too; more smoothly, she suspected, than any mere human ever had. It stepped down and stood facing her on the floor. Then it just peeled apart, splitting centrally down every part nearest her, its legs, torso and arms spread almost flat out to each side, doubling its profile.

  She stepped down too, faced it. She looked at its shiny inside surface and felt herself swallow. She glanced back. Demeisen was still staring at the screen. He seemed to become aware of a delay and looked round at her. “What?”

  “You,” she began, then had to stop. She cleared her throat. “You really … wouldn’t hurt me, would you?” She hadn’t meant to, but then she found herself saying, “You did promise.”

  The avatar looked at her, expression uncertain, then smiled. “Yes, I promised, Led.”

  She nodded, turned, stepped backwards into the suit. The suit closed calmly around her, pressing gently in on the gel suit but seeming to add no weight. The helmet didn’t close completely; the visor slid away above leaving her an unrestricted field of vision.

  “Walk normally,” Demeisen said, not looking back at her.

  She walked normally, expecting to be dragging the suit with her, or maybe to fall over. Instead the suit felt like it was walking with her. She got back into the seat again, highly aware of her silvery bulk.

  “I feel like I’m a fucking space warrior,” she told the avatar.

  “Well you’re not,” Demeisen said. “I am.” He flashed a smile.

  “Hurrah for you. So, what now?”

  “Now we try focusing what’ll look like the track scanner of a Torturer class straight back. That’ll pick up our overtaking enthusiast.”

  “Won’t that look suspicious?”

  “Not that much; ships – especially warships, and especially old warships – do that kind of thing, every now and again. Just in case.”

  “How often would you find something?”

  “Practically never.”

  “Are all old warships that jumpy?’

  “The ones that survived are,” Demeisen said. “And then some of us are just paranoid. I’ve been known to back-flip and point my primary ahead scanner directly backwards, just to make sure there’s no fucker tagging quietly along behind. Not for long of course. It’s a bit scary; like running backwards in the dark.” The avatar laughed. “Though not as scary as thinking you’re sneakily pursuing some uns
uspecting ship and then suddenly finding yourself all lit up and blinking in the glare of an Abominator class’s forward scanner.” The avatar looked amused at this. “Anyway, here we go.”

  Lededje watched the screen. The granularity in the centre of the image resolved into a shape. It looked like a sort of rounded black snowflake with eight-fold symmetry.

  There was a pause. Demeisen’s eyebrows went up.

  “Yes?” Lededje said after a few moments when the avatar hadn’t said anything. “And? What’s happening?”

  “Fucking hell,” Demeisen said. “They’re speeding up, fast.”

  Lededje stared at the screen but nothing seemed to have changed. “What are you going to do?” she asked the avatar.

  Demeisen whistled out a breath. “Oh, I am so tempted to just sprint off and leave the fuckers standing, or do the back-flip scanner thing with full targeting component and shout ‘Hello there, fellow space farers! Can I help you?’” The avatar sighed. “But we’ll learn more if we stick with the innocent little Torturer class disguise for a bit. They’ll be on us in about forty minutes.” Demeisen looked at her with what was probably meant to be a reassuring look. He wasn’t very good at it. “You must understand that this is almost certainly still nothing, and you can climb out of that suit quite soon.”

  “It’s very comfortable.

  “Is it? Good, good. So I understand. Anyway, just to be on the safe side I’m spooling up to full operational readiness.”

  “Battle stations?” she asked.

  Demeisen looked pained. “Terribly old expression. From so long ago ships had crews. Or crews that weren’t just along for the ride. But yes.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  He smiled. “My dear girl, in Culture history alone it has been about nine thousand years since a human, marvellous though they are in so many other ways, could do anything useful in a serious, big-guns space battle other than admire the pretty explosions … or in some cases contribute to them.”

  “Contribute?”

  “Chemicals; colours. You know.”

  Twenty-two

  Anyway, more help is on the way.”

  “It is? Well, hippety-hey for us. What is it? Who are they?”

  “Some old Torturer class.”

  “What, a proper ship?”

  “A proper warship. Though old, like I say. Here in a couple of hours.”

  “So soon. That’s unannounced.”

  “That’s old warships for you. Tramp around, don’t tell anybody where they are or what they’re up to for years, decades or longer, but then every now and again one of them finds itself in the right place at the right time to do something useful. Breaks the monotony, I suppose.”

  “Well, it’s come to the right fucking place to do that.”

  “Woh. Getting frazzled, are we?”

  “No more than you, coll.”

  “That’s estcoll to you.”

  “Blit a few kilo more of these little graveller fucks and you might just pretend to the level of esteemed colleague. Until then you’re only provisionally even a colleague, coll.”

  “Golly. Terrible how we flirt, isn’t it?”

  “Oh my, yes,” Auppi Unstril said, grinning, even though this was a sound-only comm. “Gets me all-scale flushed up. Any other news?”

  “Our ever-helpful estcolls in the GFCF report they’re just about containing the outbreaks they’ve come across,” Lanyares Tersetier

  – colleague and lover – told her. “Like us, they keep thinking that’s it, dealt with, under control, then another bit flares up. Mostly, though, they seem to be spending their time like they said: checking out all the other fabricaria.”

  “I suppose we should be grateful they seem to be coping so well.”

  “And that they had so many ships that close.”

  “Yeah. Makes you wonder what they were all doing hereabouts in the first place.”

  “You really have it in for the little cute guys, don’t you?”

  “Is that how it sounds?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I don’t trust those little fucks.”

  “They speak very well of you.”

  “They speak very well of everybody.”

  “That so bad?”

  “Yes; it means you can’t trust them.”

  “You’re so cynical.”

  “And paranoid. Don’t forget paranoid.”

  “You sure you wouldn’t have done better in SC?”

  “No, I’m not. What about the Hylo?” The Fast Picket

  Hylozoist was on the far side of the Disk from where they were. Bamboozlingly, an almost simultaneous eruption of smatter had taken place alarmingly near to the Disk’s Initial Contact Facility, the principal – indeed, by treaty terms, mandatory – base for all the species currently taking an active interest in the Tsungarial Disk. If anything, that infection was worse than this one, with fewer but more sophisticated machines emerging like hatching larvae from a scatter of fabricaria clustered about the Facility itself and taxing the long-disarmed Hylozoist severely. It was just about coping in its own theatre, but it had no more resources to spare for the outbreaks Auppi and her friends were trying to handle.

  “Same; still struggling to cope with its share of the fun.”

  The GFCF were already talking darkly about some sort of plot; these two outbreaks, so close together in time but far apart in terms of Disk geometry, looked suspicious, they reckoned. They suspected dastardly outside interference and would not rest until the culprits were unmasked. In the meantime they would fight valiantly alongside their esteemed Culture comrades to contain, roll back and ultimately extinguish the smatter outbreak. They were sending their ships all over the Disk, ensuring that the infection was spreading no further while leaving their more martially oriented Culture cousins to do the equivalent of the hand-to-hand stuff. (Play to one’s strengths, and all that.) Even trying to avoid the truly vicious stuff, they were still stumbling across bits of it now and again. They were doing their best to smite with the best of them (which meant the Culture, obviously), even though this was not really in their nature.

  “Okay. So what’s the news with you personally, lover?”

  “Missing you. Otherwise okay. Keeping busy.”

  “Oh, aren’t we all? Well, I’d better go. More swarmers to waste. Got another cloud coming out of one of the mid L-Sevens. Off I go to blit.”

  “Blit away. Don’t get blitted.”

  “Ditto to you. Till next—”

  “You forgot to say, ‘Missing you too.’”

  “Wha—? I did, didn’t I? What a crap girlfriend. Miss you; love you.”

  “Love you too. Back to the fray, I guess.”

  “Hold on. We have a name for that Torturer class?”

  “Oddly, no. Probably means it’s one of the particularly weird ones. Want to bet it’s a vet of the I-war still troubled and trying to deal with its issues after a millennium and a half?”

  “Oh, fuck. A weirded-up geriatric warship getting piled into the current mix. With our luck it’ll have come to join the fucking outbreak, not help us jump up and down on it.”

  “There now; cynical, paranoid and pessimistic. I think that completes the set, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ll use at least part of the next four hours thinking up fresh negativities to display for you. Good hunting.”

  “Spoiled for choice out here. You too. Off.”

  “Later. Off.”

  Auppi Unstril muted comms, glanded a little more edge and took a deep breath as the drug coursed through her. The displays seemed to sharpen and brighten, their 3D qualities appeared enhanced and all the other signals coming into her sort of freshened, whether they were auditory, tactile or anything else – and there was a lot else. She felt very alert, and raring to go.

  “Junkie,” said the ship.

  “Yep,” she said. “Enjoying it, too.”

  “You worry me sometimes.”

  “When I worry you all the time
we may have started to reach equilibrium,” she told it, though it was more just the sort of thing you felt you had to say when you were riding an edge buzz than what she actually felt. The ship didn’t really worry her at all. She worried it. Just as it should be; she enjoyed that feeling too.

  The ship wasn’t really a ship (too small) and so didn’t have a proper name; it was a Fast Fleet Liaison Module with emergency weaponisationability (or something) and all it had was a number. Well, it had been thoroughly weaponisationed all right and it had room inside for a human pilot so, like the dashingly gorgeous Mr. Lanyares Tersetier – colleague and lover – she’d been determined not to let the machines have all the fun dealing with the unexpected, semi-widespread and bizarrely uncontainable smatter outbreak. She’d decided to call the ship The Bliterator, which smacked even her as a bit childish, but never mind.

  Auppi and the ship blitted the fuck out of whatever elements of the hegswarm outbreak they got to point themselves at; just blowing the Selfish Dust out of the skies. She was genuinely in mortal danger, hadn’t slept more than a few minutes at a time for

  – well, off-hand, she couldn’t remember how many days – and she was starting to feel more like a machine than a fully functioning and quite attractive human female. Didn’t matter; she was loving it.

  There were immersive shoot-games as good – arguably better in some ways – than this, and she had played them all, but this had an advantage over all of them: it was real.

  One unlucky collision with a boulder, stone, gravel granule, or maybe even sand-grain-size bit of the current infection and she’d be lucky to live. Same applied to the weapons that some of these later outbreakians were coming equipped with. (That was worrying in itself – the hegswarm getting gunned-up too; developing.) So far the weapons themselves were nothing to worry a properly prepared tooled-up piece of Culture offensive kit, like the one she was in, humble civilian transport origins or not, but

  – again – an unlucky combination of events and she’d be plasma, meat-dust; a highly distributed red smear.

  She, Lanyares and the others had agreed that knowing that fact added something to the whole experience. Terror, mostly. But also an extra level of excitement, of exultation when you came out the other side of an encounter still alive, plus a feeling after each engagement that you never really got in a sim: that of having genuinely done something, of accomplishment.