In the Culture, stuff like this would be collected by Minds with an interest in just such societal flotsam and jetsam and stored in the specially adapted bays and hangars of GSVs, or in the subsidiary structures of Orbital Hubs. In the Gzilt, the Centralised Dataversities of Ospin were the place; they acted as the sump, the filtered, partitioned bilges of the civilisation.

The main Incast Facility within Bokri lay in the centre of a broad, circular lake; it was a spherical building a kilometre across looking like a sort of reversed image of an iceberg, with barely a tenth of its bulk seemingly lying beneath the surface of the lake. It was mostly white, wore its multi-storey nature on its surface with obvious horizontal divisions but possessed relatively few piercings, windows or balconies.

It was generally reached by an evacuated travel-tube system set on a long, elegantly thin bridge extending from the shore of the lake, a kilometre away. The Mistake Not … reckoned they didn’t really have the time to indulge in such niceties, so deposited Cossont, the android Eglyle Parinherm and its own avatar Berdle near the centre of the building, Displacing them neatly into an empty elevator car and using a small collection of similarly dropped-off comms and effector gear to start interfacing/interfering with the facility’s own administrational data complexes.

The ship itself, though much slowed for its erratic transit of the system, hadn’t paused as it passed Bokri. It had already taken a wild, almost jagged route through the cloud of habitats and dataversities, pinging from one to another like a ball down a nail-board, just to confuse anybody following; having got Cossont and the others to their destination, and feeling fairly sure that it had indeed shaken off any pursuing craft, it raced off to continue its eccentric join-the-dots loop through the system.

It had promised to be back within the hour; that ought to be long enough.

“Still not getting anything?” Cossont asked the avatar.

Berdle shook his head. “Pinging away merrily,” he said quietly, “but nothing’s answering.”

The avatar and the various pieces of gear the ship had Displaced into and around the facility were trying to locate the device with QiRia’s mind-state inside it by sending out signals it might respond to, assuming it possessed any normal Culture processing. The Mistake Not … had tried to contact the Warm, Considering – the ship believed to have helped QiRia encode his mind-state within the cube – to get whatever technical details about the device it could, but the other ship had yet to reply. From what it could gather, nobody willing to tell even knew where the Warm, Considering was.