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GSV I Liked It Better This Way Anyway

-Will you at least talk to it?

~I don’t want to go back, ship.

-Why not?

~I just don’t want to, alright?

-Will you tell me eventually?

~I don’t know. No. Can we focus on the matter at hand?

-What do you want me to tell it?

~Tell it to go away.

-Alright…

Tyu-Vrer materialised inside their office within the Peace Faction Virtual Embassy Environment. It was, at the moment, a rather luxurious bedroom.



~You didn’t preconfigure it for the Talar envoy?

-You didn’t ask.



Tyu-Vrer made the best approximation of an irritated stare that one could make over a direct neural connection. The room flickered before them, becoming something more suitable for the envoy that was due to arrive in a couple minutes. The bedroom was replaced with something more akin to a lounge, with long stretched bean bags spread out across the floor in a triangle shape, each bag with its long side presented to the others, so as to allow for the Talar’s naturally quadrupedal selves to sit in comfort. Tyu-Vrer themself would lie down. Adorning the walls were large, unframed, high definition images of Culture Orbitals, each animated to show the Orbitals’ slow rotation. Outside the window was a direct view of a large GSV, along with its usual retinue of smaller GSVs, GCVs and GCUs catching a lift from the larger, faster vessel. This was, in fact, a real-time view of the outside of the GSV I Liked It Better This Way Anyway, taken from one of its slaved modules, stationed near the outer edges of its inner field in order to give the effect of looking out a window onto the ship.

A bell rang.

“Come on in,” Tyu-Vrer called out and immediately after, two Talar diplomats, dressed in largely casual attire by Talar standards - a thin but opaque layer of fabric loosely thrown over their body, animated with patterns corresponding to their emotional state - appeared sitting on the the two bags in front of them. Tyu-Vrer themself sat down on the third bean bag, facing the two diplomats.

“Ah, Tyu, it’s good to see you again,” said the first, giving a large grin and staring them right in the eye. Xyr name was “Eight-Seventeen” and xe were particularly fond of Tyu-Vrer, which was not necessarily something the human reciprocated, though they were of course with no ill feelings towards the young Talar. Accompanying 8-17 was a slightly older diplomat, with whom Tyu-Vrer had had quite a lot of interactions with over the ten years or so of service that they had working with the Talar. The older diplomat was called 1-156 and was somewhere around the age of a thousand, though xe seemed not to remember. For sure, xe’d seen the Talar through a long range of transitions and interactions, especially with the Culture. Tyu nodded to the two diplomats and waved their hand, indicating to the Ship to bring them drinks. A drone appeared between them, a metal tray suspended above it by a field.

“What would you care for?” Tyu-Vrer asked their two guests.

“A red Oln, please, drone” replied 8-17. 1-156 merely shook xyr head.

Two glasses appeared on the tray, one clear and another red. They took their drinks and settled down on the bags again.

“So, how can the Culture help you today.”

“We would like to ask the help of a Culture ship in our current project constructing hyperspace shielding around the black hole 88IP-7KL, for the eventual end of constructing a protected, superdense data centre,” 1-156 began. “The Ship would likely be needed to perform survey work, verify plans and safeguard the construction process.”

Tyu-Vrer mulled it over for a second.

~It seems a reasonable enough request.

-Lot of work for the ship involved, though.

~Not completely infeasible.

-Could set up some sort of working group for it. Series of volunteers, each spend a couple months on the project?

~Can you just, quickly ask some other Ships. See what answers you get.

-I have a couple volunteers. GSV Eclectic Collection of Ex-Museum Exhibits and a couple of its child ships. Apparently it has a Talar researcher on board? Interesting.

“There’s several ships interested in helping with the project. It’s unlikely a single ship can stay on the project for too long a time though.”

“Several would work,” 8-17 replied. “Any help is welcome In fact, a diversity of Culture contact would be greatly appreciated.”

Tyu-Vrer sighed over their neural link.

“We’ll put you in contact with the volunteers as soon as the meeting is over. For the moment, though, I’d like to discuss a few more of the specifics of the project.”

The two Talar outlined the plan over the next hour, going over the general structural model, energy source and, to their especial excitement, the computational capacities of the system. They were planning on using the black hole as a large heatsink and hoped to even possibly double their population size with this one data centre alone, along with several dedicated research cores, at least one of which would be dedicated entirely to studying the black hole. They seemed to think there might be some benefit to probing inside it via hyperspace, even though it was widely regarded as a futile endeavour by most Level 8s. Tyu-Vrer and the Ship were happy to leave this pretense to them. Perhaps they would come across something everyone else had failed to see.

When the two Talar eventually left, after several more drinks, Tyu-Vrer had the Ship convert the space back into their bedroom environment. They flopped down on the bed and sighed.

~They really are exhausting sometimes.

-They have lively role models. Speaking of which-

~Why does it want me back?

-You know what Caldera-classes are like with their crews. It misses you.

~Does it not realise I’d rather just be happy without it.

-That’s not very fair to it, now is it. I think it feels a little guilty as well, given what happened and all.

~It’s not its fault. Have you told it that?

-I don’t think it needs me telling.

~Either way. Just. Tell it to leave me alone for a little bit longer. Maybe I’ll be more amiable in a bit.

-If you say so.