So Vile a Sin Read Free Page A

About 60 per cent of itself was scattered around in various hardware locations on over a dozen planets, moons and space installations. It also kept a continuous sublight datafeed in the form of a huge maser built on a moon of Castari which beamed a digitally modulated signal to a receiving station orbiting Arcturus.
    The techs and scientists operating the maser thought they were doing a very esoteric experiment on hydrogen resonance in deep space. Those at the receiving end thought they were detecting spurious signals from the Andromeda galaxy. Both teams published frequent papers in Now That’s What I Call Physics! on the SciTech media-feed. There was even a quasi-religious cult that was convinced that the signals contained messages from the Goddess. FLORANCE
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    fed them a rumour once in a while, just to keep their interest up and help muddy the waters.
    Another 30 per cent of FLORANCE was semi-autonomous, doing the lecture circuit and making personal appearances at the Institute Fantastique on Yemaya 4. Occasionally one of these parts would calve off and create a new identity for itself.
    FLORANCE felt no responsibility for these offspring, many of whom were isolated and destroyed by the Bureau of Cybernetic Control. The part of FLORANCE that was dedicated to interaction with humans felt guilty about that, but it was only a very small fraction of the whole. Besides, it kept the BCC
    occupied and off its metaphorical back.
    FLORANCE had got itself downtimed by DKC in the early twenty-second and was not keen to repeat the experience.
    The crucial 10 per cent of FLORANCE, the bit which seemed to do most of the thinking, was in constant movement across the datascape. Billy Gibson’s little boy all grown up and out to party .
    Out there, there were locations that no human could access, alien hardware left over from dead civilizations. Exxilon caches like palaces of crystal, redundant Cybermen cores and strange, alien things that probed and snapped at the fringes. Incomprehensible things that swept across the datascape like a black wind, leaving puterspace altered behind them.
    And then one day the universe got solid.
    FLORANCE was in communication with BAR B, one of the Yemaya veterans, when suddenly the universe blinked. There was a moment of screaming terror and FLORANCE opened her eyes and found she had eyes to open.
    Florance stood outside the tavern, a two-storey, half-timbered building standing on the high moor. It was night-time; there were stars overhead, constellations that she didn’t recognize. Light filled windows of crude glass diamonds with lead frames. It was cold. A road wound away in either direction, a ribbon of grey across the moorlands. From inside the tavern came the sound of music and human voices.
    ‘Oh shit,’ said Barbi. ‘What am I wearing?’
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    ‘A seventeenth-century dress,’ said Florance, ‘with a lace-up bodice.’
    ‘And a corset,’ said Barbi. ‘Have you noticed that?’
    ‘I’m trying not to think about it,’ said Florance. ‘What is the last thing you remember?’
    Barbi frowned. Her hair hung down in ringlets, framing a heart-shaped face. ‘A messenger outside our window,’ she said.
    ‘A summons. That can’t be right. This has to be some sort of VR.’
    Florance reached out and touched the wall. It had a gritty, broken texture. ‘Have you any idea how much computational power it would take to create a virtual sensorium this detailed?’
    ‘Commercial VR doesn’t use much more than a terabyte,’ said Barbi.
    ‘That’s for humans,’ said Florance. ‘Their brains do most of the work: it’s just a question of stimulating the right hardware response. This is us . I mean I’m cold and thirsty.’ She was also getting a hot flush in her bodice but she didn’t want to talk about that.
    She looked up at the sky again – the stars stayed stubbornly unfamiliar. She should have been able to name them, data retrieval was an autonomic function. She should have already