Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

by Iain M. Banks

A Changer was a threat to anybody who ruled by force, either of will or of arms. Amahain-Frolk had known that, and so would Kraiklyn. There was also a degree of human-basic revulsion reserved for Horza’s species. Not only were they much altered from their original genetic stock, they were a threat to identity, a challenge to the individualism even of those they were never likely to impersonate.

For a thousand years or more Culture drones had had aura fields which colored according to their mood—their equivalent of facial expression and body language—but Jase was old, made long before aura fields were thought of, and had refused to be refitted to accommodate them.

The Minds that the Culture’s factory craft, safe Orbitals and larger GSVs were now producing were some of the most sophisticated collections of matter in the galaxy. They were so intelligent that no human was capable of understanding just how smart they were (and the machines themselves were incapable of describing it to such a limited form of life).

There were in excess of eighteen trillion people in the Culture, just about every one of them well nourished, extensively educated and mentally alert, and only thirty or forty of them had this unusual ability to forecast and assess on a par with a well-informed Mind (of which there were already many hundreds of thousands). It was not impossible that this was pure luck; toss eighteen trillion coins in the air for a while and a few of them are going to keep landing the same side up for a long, long time.

She was suddenly aware that she was thinking about planets because of something Jase had just said. She turned round and looked earnestly at the dark gray machine, playing back her shortterm memory to recall exactly what it had just said.

From a spectator’s point of view, Damage’s special attraction was that the closer you stood to the emotor unit of any particular player, the more of the emotions they were experiencing affected you directly, too. A whole subculture of people hooked on such thirdhand feelings had grown up in the few hundred years since Damage had become such a select but popular game: the moties.

General Systems Vehicles were like encapsulated worlds. They were more than just very big spaceships; they were habitats, universities, factories, museums, dockyards, libraries, even mobile exhibition centers. They represented the Culture—they were the Culture. Almost anything that could be done anywhere in the Culture could be done on a GSV.

The whole display that was the Orbital’s destruction was, for all its humanly perceivable grandeur, quite wasted on the animal eye. A spectacle for the machines, thought Horza; that was all it was. A sideshow for the damn machines.

Their engines were each a focus of energy almost beyond imagining, packing sufficient power within their two hundred meters to equal perhaps one percent of the energy produced by a small sun, flinging the two vessels across the four-dimensional void at an equivalent speed in real space of rather less than ten light-years per hour. At the time, this was considered particularly fast.