Excession

What a rather saddening thought, thought the Sleeper Service. All we're looking for when we Sublime is our score…

It was getting near time, the ship thought sadly, to send off its mind-state, to parcel up its mortal thoughts and emotions and post them off, away from this — by the look of it — soon-to-be-overwhelmed physicality called the Sleeper Service (once called, a long time ago, the Quietly Confident) and consign it to the remembrance of its peers.

It would probably never live again in reality. Assuming there was what it knew as reality to come back to at all of course (for it was starting to think; What if the Excession's expansion was equidirectional, and never stopped; what if it was a sort of new big-bang, what if it was destined to take in the whole galaxy, the whole of this universe?). But, even so, even if there was a reality and a Culture to come back to, there was no guarantee it would ever be resurrected. If anything, the likelihood was the other way; it was almost certainly guaranteed not to be regarded as a fit entity for rebirth in another physical matrix. Warships were; that guarantee of serial immortality was the seal upon their bravery (and had occasionally been the impetus for their foolhardiness); they knew they were coming back…

But it had been an Eccentric, and there were only a few other Minds who knew that it had been true and faithful to the greater aims and purposes of the Culture all the time rather than what everybody else no doubt thought it was; a self-indulgent fool determined to waste the huge resources it had been quite deliberately blessed with. Probably, come to think of it, those Minds who did know the extent of its secret purpose would be the last to rally to any call to resurrect it; their own part in the plan — call it conspiracy if you wished — to conceal its true purpose was probably not something they wished to broadcast. Better for them, they would think, that the Sleeper Service died, or at least that it existed only in a controllable simulationary state in another Mind matrix.

The giant ship watched the Excession, still billowing out towards it. For all its prodigious power, the Sleeper now felt as helpless as the driver of an ancient covered wagon, caught on a road beneath a volcano, watching the incandescent cloud of a nueé ardente tearing down the mountainside towards it.

The replies from the What Is The Answer And Why? and the Use Psychology via the Grey Area and the Jaundiced Outlook ought to be coming in soon, if they came at all.

It signalled the avatar aboard the Jaundiced Outlook to consign the humans" mind-states to the AI cores, if the ship would agree (there would be a fine test of loyalty!). Let them work out their stories there if they could. The transition would anyway prepare the humans for the transmission of their mind-states if and when the Excession's destructive boundary caught up with the Jaundiced Outlook; that was the only succour they could be offered.

What else?

It sifted through the things it still had left to do.

Little of real import, it reckoned. There were thousands of studies on its own behaviour it had always meant to glance at; a million messages it had never looked into, a billion life-stories it had never seen through to the end, a trillion thoughts it had never followed up…

The ship kicked through the debris of its life, watching the towering wall of the Excession come ever closer.

It sca

Next, the Sleeper Service picked through the immense stack of unanswered messages it had accumulated over the decades. Here were all the signals it had glanced at and found irrelevant, others it had completely ignored because they issued from craft it disliked, and a whole sub-set of those it had chosen to disregard in the weeks since it had set course for the Excession. The stored signals were by turns banal and ridiculous; ships trying to reason with it, people wanting to be allowed aboard without being Stored first, news services or private individuals wanting to interview it, talk to it… untold wastages of senseless drivel. It stopped even glancing at the signals and instead just sca

Towards the end of the process, one message popped up from the rest, flagged as interesting by a name-recognising sub-routine. That single signal was followed by and linked to a whole series, all from the same ship; the Limited Systems Vehicle Serious Callers Only.

Regarding Gravious, was the first line.

The Sleeper Service's interest was piqued. So was this the entity the treacherous bird had been reporting back to? It opened a fat import-file from the LSV, full of signal exchanges, file assignments, a

And discovered a conspiracy.

It read the exchanges between the Serious Callers Only, The Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival and the Shoot Them Later. It watched and it listened, it experienced a hundred pieces of evidence — it was briefly, amongst many other things, the ancient drone at the side of an old man called Tishlin, looking out over an island floating in a night-dark sea — and it understood; it put one and one together and came up with two; it reasoned, it extrapolated, it concluded.

The ship turned its attention back out to the Excession's implacable advance, thinking, So now I find out; now when it's too damn late…

The Sleeper looked back to its child, the Jaundiced Outlook, still curving away from its earlier course. The avatar was preparing the humans for the entry into simulation mode.

VII

"I'm sorry," the avatar said to the two women and the man. "It will probably become necessary to shunt us into a simulation, if you agree."

They all stared at it.

"Why?" Ulver asked, throwing her arms wide.

"The Excession has begun expanding," Amorphia told them. It quickly outlined the situation.

"You mean we're going to die!" Ulver said.

"I have to confess it is a possibility," the avatar said, sounding apologetic.

"How long have we got?" Genar-Hofoen asked.

"No more than two minutes from now. Then, entering simulation mode will become advisable," Amorphia told them. "Entering it before then might be a sensible precaution, given the unpredictable nature of the present situation." It glanced round at them each in turn. "I should also point out that of course you don't all have to enter the simulation at the same time."

Ulver's eyes narrowed. "Wait a second; this isn't some wheeze to concentrate everybody's mind is it? Because if it-"

"It is not," Amorphia assured her. "Would you like to take a look?"

"Yes," Ulver said, and an instant later her neural lace had plunged her senses into the awareness of the Sleeper Service.