Culture fragment

The GCU What the Fuck? cruised the energy grid of upper hyperspace with a carefree nonchalance that other Minds rolled their metaphorical eyes at. It was perhaps over-compensating for the 1000 tightbeams a second it sent to the last recorded location to the drone Terpsichore ap Xanthe light-years ahead of its current location.

Drones were Minds of their own, as fully sentient as a ship Mind, if not as impressively well-endowed in body or computational ability. Still smarter than your average pan-human though, god bless their souls.

Terpsichore ap Xanthe con Leche, Terp to its friends, was unusual by Culture Mind standards. Minds were probably the greatest achievement of mankind and the funny part was they themselves were too limited to appreciate just how impressive the vast intelligences that kept them like pets really were. Pan-human culture had evolved beyond god, gotten bored, created some gods who created even more impressive gods and then contented itself to being kept affectionately as pets by beings they steadfastly refused to worship. To say the Culture was a pile of contractions with a smooth, slick sheen of orgiastic hedonism was to engage in admirable understatement.

So while humanity fucked itself raw and came up for air, hydration and meaningful employment, Culture Minds and Culture Ships bent the material world like modeling clay. Minds had no particular interest in hedonism or sex, but pro-created enthusiastically, creating Minds large and small in scope.

Drones were Minds fashioned to fit the scale of pan-human life. Your average Culture human could and would talk to ships and orbital hubs without a second thought, but Drones were, at least unconsciously, more approachable. They were right there "in the shit" when things got rough. Drones were Minds a person could fit their arms around. This was generally regarded as Important.

Some Minds, as Terp knew well, did not want anyone's arms or fields all that close to them. These were Minds created for the solitudes of interstellar space. As a Level 8 civilization, the Culture compromised an impressively large section of galactic space, even by Level 8 civ standards, but the thing about galaxies was they were mind-boggling huge in scope. Think of the biggest thing you can imagine. Galaxies were, uh, much bigger than that. Look, you're cute and all, but only a Culture Mind really understood how mind-bogglingly big space is.

The Drone Terpsichore ap Xanthe con Leche liked solitude fine. In theory it could be sending messages back through hyperspace to ships and hubs and, I suppose, pan-human Culture citizens, but the truth was it preferred its own company. As it was designed to.

The edges of Culture space were generally bordered by other galactic civs that the Culture was honor-bound to play nice with. And beyond that, more civs that other civs may or may not be playing nice with. And beyond that, an ocean of unexplored stars. The thing about galaxies is they were huge. Billions of stars is a lot, even for semi-immortal machine intelligences adept as surfing the skein of hyperspace for fun and profit.

The Culture Minds had long since quietly curbed the aggressive expansionist tendencies of the pan-human primate, channeling those energies into championing freedom, liberty, self-definition, and being kept like pets by their own machines. It might have been a scandal if anyone could break themselves away from perpetual self-indulgence.

But Minds like knowing, and beyond the edges of Culture space there lingered the unknown. So minds pushed outwards, sending solitary drones on survey probe missions ahead of the contact units trawling faithfully behind.

Hyperspace engines tended to be big, which was why ships tended to have them and drones did not. But ships could shoot drones foreward, skimming them across the cusp of hyperspace like stones on a pond to systems on the survey route. Drone Minds who volunteered for this were generally considered to be unstable daredevils by their peers, with good reason.

Terpsichore ap Xanthe con Leche had chosen its name, much like ships did, as a sort of joke. It meant nothing. Drone names typically designated home orbitals and design parentage but in the Culture taking the piss was always a correct option, so Terp had a laugh. A name was a name. Any meta-data another Mind might need was always embedded in the transmission protocols it sent anyway. The great thing about not being a hedonistic primate was information transfers could be dense and meaningful. A Mind could process Terp as fast as it could process Terpsichore ap Xanthe con Leche and "arriving at system X230Q826" as fast as it could 100 lines of detailed positional coordinates and a detailed flight log.

So when Terpsichore ap Xanthe con Leche arrived at X230Q826 and simply said, "Oh THAT'S interesting." before going silent, the GCU What the Fuck? was understandably concerned.