There were lots of rather gorgeous clothes inside the wardrobe; she threw on a plain, dark blue robe of what felt like the same material the liquid-soft sheet had been made of. She stood before the broad door, cleared her throat again, drew herself up and pulled on the fist-sized handle.
“Hello,” said the rather plain but very amiable-looking lady of late middle age standing outside. Behind her was a broad hallway with more doors leading off on one side and balustrades giving out onto a double-level hall on the other. “May I come in?” She had bunned white hair, sparkling green eyes and was dressed in a plain dark suit, unadorned.
“Please, do,” she said.
Sensia looked around, softly clapping her frail-looking hands once. “Shall we sit outside? I’ve sent for some drinks.”
They dragged a couple of heavy, brocaded seats out through the middle window onto the most generous of the room’s balconies, and sat down.
Her eyes stay too wide, she found herself thinking. She’s facing into the sunlight; a real person would be squinting by now, wouldn’t they?
On a ledge above, two small blue birds appeared to be fighting, rising at each other on a furious flutter of wings and almost touching breasts in mid-air before falling back again, all of this accompanied by a great deal of high-pitched twittering.
Sensia smiled warmly, clasping her hands. “So,” she said. “We are in a simulation.”
“I gathered,” she said, the word itself seemingly printed across the legs of the woman opposite.
“We’ll remove that,” Sensia said. The word disappeared from her field of vision. That felt briefly scary, though presumably she was always going to be under somebody’s control, in a sim. Sensia sat forward. “Now, this might sound a little odd, but would you mind terribly telling me your name?”
She stared at the other woman. Just for the merest instant, she had to think. What was her name? “Lededje Y’breq,” she said, almost blurted. Of course.
“Thank you. I see.” Sensia looked up towards the mad tweeting coming from the little birds above. The noise stopped suddenly. A moment later both birds flew down, settled briefly on one of Sensia’s fingers and then darted off in different directions. “And you are from where exactly?”
Another nearly imperceptible delay. “Well, I… I’m of the Veppers retinue,” she said. Veppers, she thought. How odd to think of him without fear. It was as though all that was in another life, and one that she would not have to go back to. Even as she thought about it, turning it over in her mind, the idea still held no terror. She started trying to remember where she had been last, before she ended up here. It felt like something she’d been hiding from herself, like something that some other part of her had been keeping from her. “I was born in Ubruater City and brought up in the mansion house of the estate of Espersium,” she told Sensia. “Lately, I still generally live either in Ubruater, Espersium, or sometimes just wherever Mr. Veppers might be.”
Sensia was nodding, gaze distant. “Ah-hah!” she said, sitting back, smiling. “Ubruater City, Sichult, Quyn system, Ruprine Cluster, Arm One-one Near-tip.”
Lededje recognised “Quyn” as the name the Sun went by in the rest of the galaxy and she had heard the term “Ruprine Cluster” before. She had no idea what “Arm One-one Near-tip” was; this bit of the galaxy, she supposed.
“Where am I?” she asked as a small, thick-bottomed tray arrived, floating out from the room. It held glasses and a pitcher of pale green liquid with ice in it. The device lowered between them so that it effectively became a table.
Sensia poured their drinks. “Presently, literally,” she said, settling back again, swirling her drink, “you’re in a computational substrate node of the General Systems Vehicle Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly, which is currently travelling through the ’liavitzian Blister, in the region called God’s Ear, Rotational.”
Rather than fully catching all this, Lededje had been thinking. “‘Vehicle’?” she said. “Is that a Wheel, or…?” She took a drink. The pale green liquid was delicious, though probably non-alcoholic.
Sensia smiled uncertainly. “A Wheel?”
“You know; a Wheel,” Lededje said, and became aware they were now staring at the other with mutual incomprehension.
How could this woman not know what a Wheel was?
Then Sensia’s face brightened. “Ah, a Wheel! A specific thing, with a capital letter and so on. I see. Yes, sorry; got you now.” She looked away, seemingly distracted. “Oh, yes, fascinating things…” She shook her head. “But no, not a Wheel. Bit bigger than that. Plate-class General Systems Vehicle: getting on for a hundred kilometres long if you go tip-to-tip of the outer field structure and four klicks high measuring just the naked hull. Roughly six trillion tonnes, though the mass assay gets fiendishly complicated with so much exotic matter making up the engines. About a fifth of a billion people aboard right now.” She flashed a smile. “Not counting those in virtual environments.”
“What’s it called again?”
“The Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly.” Sensia shrugged. “Where I take my name from; Sensia. I’m a ship’s avatoid.”
“That sounds like a Culture ship,” Lededje said, feeling her skin warm suddenly.
Sensia stared at her, looking genuinely surprised. “Good gracious,” she said. “You mean you didn’t even know you were on a Culture ship, even within the Culture at all? I’m surprised you’re not more disoriented. Where did you think you might be?”
Lededje shrugged. She was still trying to recall where she’d been last, before she woke up here. “No idea,” she said. “I’ve never been in a sim this good. I’m not sure we have them to this standard. I don’t think even Veppers has them this detailed.”
Sensia nodded.
“Where am I really?” Lededje asked.
“How do you mean?”
“Where’s my real self, my physical body?”
Sensia stared at her again. She put the drink down on the floating tray, her expression unreadable. “Ah,” she said. She made an o with her mouth and sucked air in, turning her head to look out at the parkland surrounding the house. She turned back to look at Lededje. “What is the last thing you remember, before you woke up here?”
Lededje shook her head. “I can’t remember. I’ve been trying.”
“Well don’t try too hard. From what I can gather it’s… traumatic.”
Lededje wanted to say something to that, but couldn’t think what. Traumatic? she thought with a sudden shiver of fear. What the hell did that mean?
Sensia took a deep breath. “Let me start by explaining that I have never had to ask for somebody’s name in these circumstances. I mean, someone — you — suddenly popping into existence un-announced.” She shook her head. “Doesn’t happen. Mind-states, souls, dynamic full-brain process inventories; whatever you call them, they always come with copious notes. You didn’t.” Sensia smiled again. Lededje formed the uncomfortable impression that the other woman was trying hard to be reassuring. This had never proved to be a good sign in Lededje’s past and she seriously doubted the pattern was about to change now. “You just immaterialised here, my dear,” Sensia told her, “in a one-time, one-way emergency-entanglement vicariously inherited legacy system event of what us Minds would generally call Laughably High Unexpectancy. And most bizarrely of all you came with what one might call no paperwork, zero documentation. Absolutely without accompanying context material. Docketless.”
“Is that unusual?”
Sensia laughed. She had a surprisingly deep, almost raucous laugh. Lededje found herself smiling despite the apparent gravity of the subject. “Not so much unusual,” Sensia said. “More entirely without precedent in roughly the last fifteen hundred busy years. Frankly I’m finding that hard to believe myself and, trust me, I have lots and lots of other avatars, avatoids, agents, feelers and just plain old requests out at the moment asking if anybody else has heard of such a thing — all without positive reply so far.”