to respond to its clients’ personalities; for Sessine this meant that it appeared as a tall, highly attractive woman in early middle-age who wore her long black hair tied back, used little make-up, dressed in late-twentieth-century corporate-male clothes and talked with quiet authority; Sessine found it almost amusing how perfectly such an image demanded and received his attention. No bullshit, no unnecessary gestures or expressions, no false buddiness, no flimflam and no attempts either to impress or ingratiate. Even his short attention span and low boredom threshold had been catered for; she spoke fast. And in the pauses, he could imagine her unclothed (though, as she was a separate entity within the crypt, such imagining no more made itself immediately actual than it would have had they both been real people in base-reality).
He supposed that a male construct might have worked almost as well, but he liked smart, quick-witted, self-assured women, and he despised the off-the-peg models of such constructs just because convention demanded they must exhibit some hint of vulnerability, some girlishness that was supposed to make him feel that despite such obvious capability and presence, this woman was some kind of sexual pushover, or not really his equal.
They were sitting in a vault room of the Bank of England, in Edwardian times. Their seats were constructed of gold ingots and cushioned with layers of big white five-pound notes; their table was a trolley normally used to transport bullion. Primitive electric lights flickered on the metal walls and reflected off further piles and stacks of gold bars. Sessine had salvaged the image from an early twenty-first-century VR fiction.
‘What do we have on the man who murdered me?’
‘He was called John Ilsdrun IV, second-lieutenant. Nothing anomalous in his background or recent behaviour. His implants had been doctored and, if he survives in usable form anywhere, it is not in the general body of the crypt. We’re running deeper checks on all his lives and contacts so far, but they’ll take subjective days to complete.’
‘And the message he received?’
‘A code within the gistics burst: “Veritas odium parit.”’
“‘Truth begets hatred.” How cryptic.’
The construct permitted itself a smile.
Barely five minutes had passed in base-reality since his death, and he had spent the great majority of that time unconscious, the data-set that was his stored personality being updated with the rigorously cross-checked information from the time and place of his murder before being activated: the wreck of the command car he and the rest of the crew had been killed in was still burning on the fractured floor of the Southern Volcano Room, the convoy had yet to regroup properly after the young lieutenant’s treacherous attack on it, his co-directors at Aerospace had been summoned to an emergency virtual meeting due to take place in a subjective half-hour and a base-reality physical meeting in the Atlantean Tower scheduled in two hours real - two years and three months subjective - time, while his widow had been contacted but had yet to reply.
‘Backtrack on the coded message; how did it find its way into a hardened military narrowcast?’
‘Still investigating. The jurisdictional protocols concerned are complicated.’
Sessine could imagine; the military would not easily be persuaded to open its data corpus to outside investigation.
‘I want to request an audience with Adijine, priority.’
‘Contacting the Palace, royal apartments . . . monarch’s office ... on hold . . . His Majesty’s private secretary suite . . . your call-sign going through . . . private secretary construct on line real time now. Replace?’ ‘Replace.’
The woman disappeared, turning in a blink into a small wizened man in a black dress coat and holding a long staff. He looked briefly around the vault, stood and bowed slightly to Sessine, then sat again.
‘Count
He supposed that a male construct might have worked almost as well, but he liked smart, quick-witted, self-assured women, and he despised the off-the-peg models of such constructs just because convention demanded they must exhibit some hint of vulnerability, some girlishness that was supposed to make him feel that despite such obvious capability and presence, this woman was some kind of sexual pushover, or not really his equal.
They were sitting in a vault room of the Bank of England, in Edwardian times. Their seats were constructed of gold ingots and cushioned with layers of big white five-pound notes; their table was a trolley normally used to transport bullion. Primitive electric lights flickered on the metal walls and reflected off further piles and stacks of gold bars. Sessine had salvaged the image from an early twenty-first-century VR fiction.
‘What do we have on the man who murdered me?’
‘He was called John Ilsdrun IV, second-lieutenant. Nothing anomalous in his background or recent behaviour. His implants had been doctored and, if he survives in usable form anywhere, it is not in the general body of the crypt. We’re running deeper checks on all his lives and contacts so far, but they’ll take subjective days to complete.’
‘And the message he received?’
‘A code within the gistics burst: “Veritas odium parit.”’
“‘Truth begets hatred.” How cryptic.’
The construct permitted itself a smile.
Barely five minutes had passed in base-reality since his death, and he had spent the great majority of that time unconscious, the data-set that was his stored personality being updated with the rigorously cross-checked information from the time and place of his murder before being activated: the wreck of the command car he and the rest of the crew had been killed in was still burning on the fractured floor of the Southern Volcano Room, the convoy had yet to regroup properly after the young lieutenant’s treacherous attack on it, his co-directors at Aerospace had been summoned to an emergency virtual meeting due to take place in a subjective half-hour and a base-reality physical meeting in the Atlantean Tower scheduled in two hours real - two years and three months subjective - time, while his widow had been contacted but had yet to reply.
‘Backtrack on the coded message; how did it find its way into a hardened military narrowcast?’
‘Still investigating. The jurisdictional protocols concerned are complicated.’
Sessine could imagine; the military would not easily be persuaded to open its data corpus to outside investigation.
‘I want to request an audience with Adijine, priority.’
‘Contacting the Palace, royal apartments . . . monarch’s office ... on hold . . . His Majesty’s private secretary suite . . . your call-sign going through . . . private secretary construct on line real time now. Replace?’ ‘Replace.’
The woman disappeared, turning in a blink into a small wizened man in a black dress coat and holding a long staff. He looked briefly around the vault, stood and bowed slightly to Sessine, then sat again.
‘Count
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