Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [27]
It will frustrate the drone that the actual meaning of the words escapes it, without a detailed history, a context within which to frame them. It will hope the Doctor will explain but it calculates a ninety-seven per cent probability that he will not.
The woman will speak the same words again at sleep plus six hours and fifteen minutes, two and a half hours before dawn. The drone will still find them meaningless.
'I am not a machine.'
No one knew why there was a windmill complex above iSanti Jeni. Or if they did it wasn't on public record. God probably knew but that wasn't any help. God liked to keep its little secrets since it wasn't allowed to keep the big ones. It certainly looked dramatic, stuck up on the crest of the ridge overlooking the town. That could have been reason enough to put it there; it was certainly irrelevant as a power source. SaRa!qava supposed that its very redundancy could have been the underlying aesthetic behind its construction. She could remember a fashion for useless buildings from her youth, one of the many periodic crazes in micro-landscaping that swept the sphere. She herself had designed a fully functioning factory that would have ceaselessly dug over its own spoil tip, producing nothing but columns of acrid black smoke and toxic water pollution.
The craze had already been abating when she'd submitted her proposals and had them turned down. The next big new fashion had been for concealed habitations; there was an entire city of three million people on the other side of the Endless Sea built along those lines. You could walk right through it and never know it was there. SaRa!qava didn't really mind; the idea that her redundant factory had never been built because the aesthetic it was based on had become redundant had a certain pleasing symmetry.
Still, it would have been nice to build the factory. She imagined it lurking in some lush secluded valley like a guilty secret, horrible mutant fish, cooked up especially to survive the pollution, playing in a stream below the steaming outflow.
This image of a pointless industrial landscape may have been what prompted her to hold the party at the Windmills, the actual control centre of which was an oblong lump of ridged plasticrete built half into the seaward slope below the crest. The lower four storeys were completely taken up by the hall containing the capacitors arranged in two lines of four. This was where saRa!qava would encourage the dancing to take place; the giant ceramic capacitors would loom nicely with the right lighting.
SaRa!qava had arranged a buffet on the lawn of the small terraced garden at the front of the control centre. God had promised her a clear night, average temperature twenty-one degrees centigrade, although it hinted it could accelerate a promising warm front if she asked it nicely.
Half a dozen remote-drones were ferrying in canapés, bowls of fruit, a punch bowl of a suspicious yellow dip that God insisted on sending to every party despite the fact that everybody avoided it, a selection of narcotic flowers, more food, crispy tortillas and a huge celebratory pie in the shape of a huge pie. Paper lanterns were hung from the branches of the severely ornamental trees.
SaRa!qava watched as a cargo-drone swooped low over the garden dropping a shower of metal cubes. Halfway down the cubes squirmed unpleasantly and transformed into a variety of wrought-iron garden furniture – memory metal of course – before floating the rest of the way down. This should be the last of the preparations; there were already cushions and comfy fields strewn about in the accessible nooks and crannies so there was somewhere for people to have sex. People tended to do that at parties; you couldn't stop them so they might as well be comfortable.
Actually