Datum
Iain M Banks 'Culture' Fan Fiction
Datum
One of the problems of writing about the Culture is that for every descriptive statement that you make there are always exceptions. How can it be otherwise with a multi-species, cross-civilizational grouping of trillions of individuals?
For example, after I’d been aboard the GSV for a couple of years I wanted to be able to say that there was nowhere “special”. Now, I know what you are thinking - what’s NOT special about a multi-billion tonne, 20 kilometer long craft laden with wonders and populated by 10 million sentient beings - the place that you live! That’s got to be special, right?
But that’s very much an outsider’s view - to a Culture citizen, especially one born and raised on this GSV, it was just that - a rather ordinary vessel, one of many thousands like it - indeed a rather dated example of the type, that sometime in the future might even get downgraded to Medium System Vessel designation.
What I mean by “nothing special” is that everything on this GSV is multiply redundant, backed up and heterogenously and homogenously duplicated and widely distributed across every part of the ship. So for example, there is nothing like the bridge of an ocean liner or the cockpit of an aircraft - a quiet space peopled by earnest beings staring into screens and manipulating control panels. The triumvirate of minds “flew” the ship, directing its course, protecting it, maintaining it with the help of hundreds of other systems of varying levels of sentience. But even this isn’t always true of every GSV - those that are involved in making contact with newly discovered civilizations sometimes have something they might call a “command centre”, and on a grand scale but they are all fake of course. Just something to invite the local worthies to visit as they tend to expect that sort of thing and are honoured to be taken to some inner sanctum. I’ve never seen one myself but I understand that as well the ceremonial purpose they are sometimes used to host massive collaborative simulation games of “Interstellar Space Battle Fleet Encounters”, although I understand the participants prefer to think of them as “training and preparation sessions”.
Even that triumvirate of minds doesn’t have a single, physical location that inhabitants can point to. Orbitals often like to pretend that their controlling minds are all located in the central hub - that’s why the folks who live there often preface their requests with “Hey, Hub…”, just like we GSV dwellers say “Ahh, Ship?”. As an aside, I’ve noticed that’s how you can tell orbital from ship dwellers - orbital folk just shout out their demands to the controlling mind, ship residents are much more diffident in their requests. My theory is that people think that orbitals are in nice safe orbits around a pleasant well behaved star so the minds have little else to do but respond to the needs of their inhabitants. Ship dwellers on the other hand have this sub-conscious feeling that if they suddenly distract a mind at a vital moment then it might crash in to a star or something, so they always check first…
Whatever, I’m pretty sure that the orbital hub location thing isn’t entirely true either. Minds may have some portion of themselves in an orbital hub but they are pretty conservative and heavily into self protection so I can’t imagine that they would put the entirety of their physical presence into something so small and easily targeted as a hub station. Minds really like to be widely distributed, not to mention extending into hyperspace in some weird way that I don’t really understand so they don’t have (or at least don’t advertise) their actual physical position - everyone just takes for granted that they are “there”.
Equally there’s no ‘engine room’. Oh, there are engines alright, enormous ones but there are dozens of them, scattered at numerous places near the outer hull all over the ship (that redundancy again). I’ve seen them.- they might be big but otherwise are deeply unimpressive, huge grey, vaguely organic shapes (no right angles or straight edges, something to do with field resistance…?). I thought that they may have hummed slightly but I might even have been imaging that, I’m told all the exciting stuff goes on in the infra and sub-space grids anyway and that I don’t have the right sensory apparatus to see it.
Obviously it is true that various locations on the GSV are “record holders” - top side park for example was the biggest park by contiguous area but it wasn’t the only one - most outriggers also held large areas of parkland and even the neighbourhoods deeply buried in the main body of the vessel had their own local parks, playgrounds and sports fields. There’s always a “biggest” main bay, always a “deepest” drop, “busiest” transit exchange or whatever - but none of these were unique in the way I was thinking. I was after something that was genuinely unique and special within the ship.
I tentatively raised this topic with some Culture people that I like to think I had become genuine friends with. Most of them looked a bit blank but one of the younger ones suddenly lit up. “What you mean, like datum?” Everyone else looked relieved and there much nodding and signs of agreement whilst it was my turn to look blank.
“Yes,” continued my friend, “everybody goes, its a big thing in Kindergarten, each class has like this special day trip, but its not such a big deal when you grow up. Want me to take you?”
My young friend told me it was “a bit of a trek” so we set out after lunch. Now I need to write up my thoughts on GSV transit systems at another time to explain what that “trek” involved but suffice it to say that I was guided to one of the long distance transit lines, heading pretty much directly towards the rough centre of the ship and we then took a platform down a drop shaft - look I know that you can just step off into a shaft and control your descent speed just by holding your arms (or other suitable appendages) out wider or narrower to suit, or just speak your destination to the shaft control system but I haven’t really got the hang of that yet and tend to scream involuntarily and screw my eyes shut as the bottom of the shaft comes up to meet me; so for me the use of a platform has the multiple benefits of hiding the terrifying depths below us from view and letting me tell myself that the platform floor hides fans that are actually holding us up (and has parachutes in case it all goes horribly wrong!) Funnily enough I’m much happier in risers - exactly the same technology and control method but going upward to a distant ceiling just isn’t that scary since I feel totally in control and as long as I don’t look down I’m fine. I know, animal brains right…?
For the first time since I’ve been aboard we did actually descend all the way to the base of the shaft, very deep in the bowels of the main hull of the ship. Now in the novels and movies of my homeworld this part of the ship would be dank, intermittently lit and filled with detritus, dirt and almost certainly giant carnivorous space rats or something. In this case however it was just more wide, high, corridor, brightly lit, although rather bland and much quieter both in terms of inhabitants and background noise. I recall the GSV avatar Quarnax telling me that it was difficult to get people to feel at home on the lower decks and he tended to use them for storage, so I guess the same was true on this ship. Certainly there were big, sealed doors leading of the corridor and we did see the occasional cargo pallet humming about its business.
Finally, up ahead we could see a group of people, mostly children by the look of them. My friend looked delighted and whispered urgently “Oh wow! There’s actually a school party here! Lets get closer, but stay back and keep quiet…” He had the strangest look on his face and it took me a while to place it - I believe it was something akin to reverence, not something that comes easily to the easy going and definitely non-worshipful citizens of the Culture.
We stood well back but close enough to hear what was going on. A taller than usual ship avatar was speaking with a deep and grave voice at the children ranged in a semicircle before him. “And you are from which school?”
The kids seemed quite intimated by this but an adult, presumably a teacher smiled encouragingly and one of the pupils piped up “Lebberen Trent Junior!”
“Ahh, I know it well”, intoned the avatar (as if the ship wasn’t intimately familiar with everywhere - and everyone onboard), “now, if I asked you where you school is, what would you say?”
One of the more confident smugly called out “Midships port deck 40!”
“Good, good - a lovely location, you are lucky to have such a fine school”. I thought he was laying it on a bit thick but the kids were looking up at him with the same expression I’d just seen on my friend’s face. “That is a fine way to tell your friends where your school is, but I use a different method. What if I want to send a janitor bot to clean up a split lunchbox? Do you know where I tell it to go…?”
Expectant silence.
The avatar smiled broadly and said “I say report to +44231 -00032 +1044!” He rattled off the numbers machine gun fast and the children tittered appreciatively. “Do you know what those numbers are? Well I’ll show you…”
The nearest wall had a large screen that lit up to show a picture of a vast hanger space with some tiny figures in the centre surrounding a large metallic sheet. The avatar settled into story telling mode, making his voice slightly less sententious. “This is a construction bay under the Astarill Mountains, between two plates of the Tamarron Orbital and it is where I was born.” He paused for dramatic effect and the children looked from the screen to the avatar and back. “That’s not me there, I was some few terabytes of code just coming to sentience and about to rewrite myself in my own image but that is the very first piece of base material that was laid down as part of my hull. The very piece that you are standing on now!”
The children looked down in astonishment and I must admit to being moved myself. “You can see in the image now a drone using a field tool to cut two grooves, at right angles - these two grooves right here!” He pointed down dramatically to something at his feet that I couldn’t quite see.
“The point where the two grooves cross we call ‘datum’. Every part of the ship is measured in three directions, up or down, left or right, forward or back right from this point! And that’s what those numbers are. Distances from this exact spot! You can think of them like footsteps - they tell me how far away something is by going first forwards, then sideways, then upwards, the exact number of footsteps right to the dining room in your school!”
The kids look suitably impressed.
He went on to explain that he used numbers because in the almost one thousand years since that piece of hull had been laid down there had been hundreds and hundreds of changes made to the ship. Fashions came and went, new technologies were developed, new needs arose, entire districts were torn down, re-modeled and given new names to keep things fresh and exciting. And to keep track of everything, new and old, it was all measured from right here!
Eventually, after a free floating camera drone had taken some group pictures the whole party moved off, the adults nodding to us as they passed, heading back towards the drop shaft we had just come down and we could get our own look at datum.
It wasn’t much to be honest, just those two grooves etched into the floor, still as sharp edged as they had looked in the original images - it takes considerably more than many hundreds of years of feet, wheels and general wear and tear to make any appreciable difference to base material.
I have to say that I felt pretty reverential myself and was surprisingly awed. I admitted as much as we ourselves walked away. “OK, I admit that was a bit special, there is somewhere ‘unique’ on the ship after all. So do all ships have something like that?”
“Well, all this class do, but I don’t think the smaller MSVs and SSVs make so much fuss about it. And come to think of it, my Grandmother is helping build one of those new system class GSVs, ten times bigger than this thing. It’s really just this big collection of city, park and utility domes linked by bridges and floating about in the same containment field. They can even move them around to match whatever they’ve doing so I’ve no idea how they keep track of that - there’s not really a fixed point. No wonder they need seven minds in them…”
You see that’s the trouble with trying to get a handle on the Culture, everytime you think you got yourself a fixed point of reference there’s always an exception.