Excession

She gazed into the depths of space outside space. The Excession was a vast bisected wall of fiery chaos sprinting out towards her, breathtakingly fast; a consuming conflagration of unremitting, undissipating power. She could have believed, in that instant, that her heart stopped with the shock of it. To share the senses of a ship in such a ma

Ulver saw how to click out of the experience, and did so.

She'd been in for less than two seconds. In that time her heart had started racing, her breathing had become fast and laboured and a cold sweat had broken on her skin. Wow, she thought, some drug!

Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil Gelian were staring at her. She suspected she hardly needed to say anything, but swallowed and said, "I don't think it's kidding."

She quizzed her neural lace. Twenty-two seconds had elapsed since the avatar had given them its two-minute deadline.

Dajeil turned to the avatar. "Is there anything we can do?" she asked.

Amorphia spread its hands. "You can tell me whether you each wish your mind-state to enter the simulation," it said. "It will be a precursor to transmitting the mind-states beyond this immediate vicinity to other Mind matrices. But in any event it is up to you."

"Well, yes," Ulver said. "Snap me in there when the two minutes are up."

Thirty-three seconds elapsed.

Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil were looking at each other.

"What about the child?" the woman asked, touching the bulge of her swollen belly.

"The mind-state of the fetus can be read too, of course," the avatar said. "I believe that historical precedent would indicate it would become independent of you following such transferal. In that sense, it would no longer be part of you."

"I see," the woman said. She was still gazing at the man. "So it would be born," she said quietly.

"In a sense," the avatar agreed.

"Could it be taken into the simulation without me?" she asked, still watching Byr's face. He was frowning now, looking sad and concerned and shaking his head.

"Yes, it could," Amorphia said.

"And if," Dajeil said, "I chose that neither of us went?"

The avatar sounded apologetic again; "The ship would almost certainly read its mind-state anyway."

Dajeil turned her gaze to the avatar. "Well, would it or wouldn't it?" she asked. "You are the ship; you tell me."

Amorphia shook its head once. "I don't represent the whole consciousness of the Sleeper right now," it told her. "It is busy with other matters. I can only guess. But I'd be pretty confident of such a conjecture, in this case."

Dajeil studied the avatar a moment longer, then looked back at Genar-Hofoen. "And what about you, Byr?" she asked. "What would you do?"

He shook his head. "You know," he said.

"Still the same?" she asked, a small smile on her face.

He nodded. His expression was similar to hers.

Ulver was looking from one to the other, brows creased, desperately trying to work out what was going on. Finally, when they still just sat there on opposite sides of the table giving each other this knowing grin, she threw her arms wide again and yelled, spluttering, "Well? Wbat?"

Seventy-two seconds elapsed.

Genar-Hofoen glanced at her. "I always said I'd live once and then die," he said. "Never to be reborn, never to enter a simulation." He shrugged and looked embarrassed. "Intensity," he said. "You know; make the most of your one time."

Ulver rolled her eyes. "Yeah, I know," she said. She'd met a lot of people her own age, mostly male, who felt this way. Some people reckoned to live riskier and therefore more interesting lives because they did back-up a recorded mind-state every so often, while other people — like Genar-Hofoen, obviously (they'd been together for so brief a time it wasn't something they'd got round to discussing yet) — believed that you were more likely to live your life that bit more vividly when you knew this was your one and only chance at it. She'd formed the impression this was the kind of thing people often said when they were young and then had second thoughts about as they got older. Personally Ulver had never had any time for this fashionable purist nonsense; she'd first decided she was going to live fully backed-up when she was eight. She supposed she ought to feel impressed that Genar-Hofoen was sticking to his principles in the face of imminent death — and she did feel a little admiration — but mostly she just thought he was being stupid.

She wondered whether she ought to mention that this might all be even more academic than they imagined; part of that referential knowledge she'd gained from the Sleeper Service's senses when she'd gazed upon the expanding Excession had been the realisation that there was a theoretical possibility the phenomenon might overwhelm everything; the galaxy, the universe, everything…

Best not to say anything, she thought. Kinder not to. Sure had her heart thumping, though. She was surprised the others couldn't hear it.

Oh shit. It isn't all going to end here, is it? Fuck it; I'm too young to die!

No, of course they couldn't hear her heart; she could probably start talking out loud right now and it would take them all the time they had left in this world to react, they were so wrapped up staring meaningfully into each other's eyes.

Eighty-eight seconds elapsed.

VIII

There was not long now. The Sleeper Service sent signals to a variety of craft, including the Serious Callers Only and the Shoot Them Later. Almost immediately, the signals it had been waiting for came back from the What Is The Answer And Why? and the Use Psychology, relayed through the Grey Area and the Jaundiced Outlook.

The Excession's expansion was localised; centred on the Sleeper Service itself but on a hugely broad front that encompassed all its distributed warcraft.

Ah well, it thought. It felt a dizzying sense of relief that at least it had not triggered some ultimate apocalypse. That it would die (as would, implicitly, all its warship children, the three humans aboard and possibly the Grey Area, the Jaundiced Outlook) was bad enough, but it could take some comfort that its actions had led to nothing worse.

The GSV never really knew why it did what it did next; perhaps it was a kind of desperation at work born of its appreciation of its impending destruction, perhaps it meant it as an act of defiance, perhaps it was even something closer to an act of art. Whatever; it took the ru

Then the Sleeper Service glanced back to the sensorium of its avatar aboard the Jaundiced Outlook.

At the same moment, the Excession's expanding boundary started to change. The ship split its attention between the macro-cosmic and the human-scale.