The two ships hadn’t got the same equipment refitted, either; their weapon mix was different, the Value Judgement having chosen an array designed primarily for tech-superiority situations where effectors worked best and were the most humane choice (Scavenger-compatible, in other words) while the Refreshingly … had gone for a more equiv-tech ordnance mixture, leading with the sort of gear that could take on ships of its own level.

Ziborlun and Chekwri sat, near the back. On the dais, some boring people began talking boringly.

The silver-skinned avatar frowned. “Septame Banstegeyn looks like he’s eaten something that disagrees with him, don’t you think?” it observed.

The marshal barely glanced. “Hmm. Monitoring seems to have been on your mind recently,” she said quietly, her head angled towards the avatar. “Our Near-Approaches AIs seem to think you’ve been showing increased interest in what little comings and goings we still have around here in these reduced times.”

“This is true,” the avatar conceded. Back aboard the Passing By …, the Mind controlling both the Systems Vehicle and the avatar was doing the hyper-AI equivalent of grimacing and mouthing the word shit. “We feel there is a need for a more robust system, given the general attrition of informational flow recently. So little coming in from so many places.”

“Most people have had themselves Stored,” the marshal said. “And many of the ships have already gone into the Sublime. So of course there is less to report.”

“Yes.” The avatar frowned. “Do you really think that was wise? Sending so many of the ships ahead, I mean?”

Such behaviour was not unknown when a society was preparing to Sublime, but it was unusual. It felt like scouting out unknown terrain, like an insurance policy, to make sure your own people were truly compatible with the whole process, even though a copious and exhaustively annotated and referenced history had built up over the aeons indicating that there was absolutely no need to do so. Also, the way the Gzilt configured the AIs in their capital ships – a whole crew of once-human personalities, uploaded, vastly speeded up and sharing a multiply partitioned but at root single computational matrix – meant that the vessels were already a kind of image of a population in an Enfolded state, so the step to true Subliming would have seemed easy enough to make for them, as a kind of easily digestible precursor to the main event.

“Of course we thought it was wise,” Marshal Chekwri said. “Or we would not have permitted it.”