Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 575
were extensive; after all, in order to guard my captain I needed
to know the differences between cries of passion and those of
fear, the slowness of distracted thought and that of illness, and
so on. I already had a model of her emotions. I merely had to
take that model and make it my main behavioural drive.
You became Calandria?
Yes, Axel, as best I could. There were many sights on
Diadem that would stop any human in her tracks. To describe
only one: one morning I emerged from a long hexagonal
tunnel full of machine traffic to find myself on a hillside above
a lake. This oval crater, at least two kilometers deep and five
wide, was roofed with geodesic glass like others I had seen. It
was muggy and hot here, and palm fronds waved dissolutely in
an artificial breeze. Just then sunlight was falling in a single
shaft through tiny trapped clouds onto the emerald surface of
the lake. I gasped as Calandria would have at the light that
shimmered there.
Elsewhere, I wept in frustration at my inability to create
clothing or make fire for myself. I hugged myself and sang
aloud for company. I tried to bargain with the Winds, and
screamed my frustration when they would not answer.
At first, I did these things self-consciously, as a strategy
to avoid the Winds’ detecting what I was. But I found that if I
did this, I was continually booting up my model of Calandria
and then shutting it down again after I had exhibited some
behavior or other. It became obvious after a few days that the
result was discontinuous: my emotions began with whatever I
reacted to first upon booting up the model, then evolved until I
shut it down. If I restarted it the continuity of my behavior was
broken. I was acting like a mad woman, in other words,
laughing one moment then crying the next, backtracking on my
path as new emotional dynamics made me seem to change my