{[But… but… Kiki gave me a piano?]}
[[Technically speaking she only procured the instrument for you. You paid for it]]
{[I did?]}
[[Clause 674(a) All legitimate business expenses made directly on behalf of the artist are deductible from post-commission income]]
{[So now I’ve just severely pissed someone off by trying to say thank you?]}
[[••]]
Now Dielle was pissed off.
{[I’ve had enough of this]}
[[~?]]
{[I’ve had enough of being caught out by not knowing stuff that everyone else knows already]}
[[What do you want to know?]]
{[I DON’T KNOW! Just tell me everything and let me decide what I need to know]}
[[That is not possible]]
{[~?]}
[[The human brain is not capable of knowing everything. It has a finite number of connections and a relatively limited storage capacity. In order to compensate for this it has sophisticated filtering mechanisms that retain only the most relevant parts of what is perceived through its organic sensory interfaces, supplemented by a random selection of complete irrelevancies in order to maintain perspective. In the same way, information that is streamed to you through your neural interface is also selectively filtered according to your preferences]]
{[But how do I know what preferences to select if I don’t know what I need to know?]}
[[You don’t. Your preferences are set to local average]]
{[Local? You mean they alter depending on where I am?]}
[[Of course. For example if you are at a skimmer race the local average data prefs are focussed upon the event and associated data because that’s what everyone there wants to know. But if you are jogging in Downtown Seacombe DownSide you are going to get latest stock prices and business news]]
{[So what I get to know is determined by what everyone else in the locality wants to know?]}
[[Essentially yes. It is, however, modified according to your personal heuristogram which in your case is still fairly coarsely defined]]
{[So other people select specific data requirements which alters the local averages and that determines what I get to know?]}
[[Usually most people can’t be bothered. They just use the local averages and make occasional specific requests]]
{[So who sets the averages?]}
[[Everyone does]]
{[But you just said most people use the average]}
[[••]]
Dielle added frustrated to pissed off.
{[Look, just tell me one thing I don’t know. Something I might want to know. Something that everyone else knows and takes for granted]}
[[There are a lot of prefs]]
{[Such as?]}
[[In order of bandwidth demand: data type, speed & granularity, heat and light, message filtering, privacy settings, body tech, medication and dietary, gravity direction and strength, financi…]]
{[Stop. Medication?]}
[[You are aware that your body has 127 embedded emties. Not all of them deal with waste disposal and monitoring. Several of them are placed in areas where required medication can be delivered with optimum efficiency]]
{[What kind of medication?]}
[[By usage: food additive antidotes, anti-anxieties, antidepressants, antipsychotics, cellular decay inhibitors, anti-inflammatories, cardio-vascular regulators, sexual performance enhancers, fatigue combatants, vitamin deficiency compensators…]]
{[Stop. How often do these get used?]}
[[Continually]]
{[By how many people?]}
[[Everyone on average prefs]]
{[What? They’re all constantly being fed antipsychotics?]}
[[••]]
{[That doesn’t sound very healthy to me]}
[[It’s a significantly better system than the way things used to be. For centuries, your species self-medicated indiscriminately. You poisoned yourselves with nicotine, ethyl alcohol and a wide variety of illicit and usually toxic chemicals, all of which had hugely detrimental side effects. Mental retardation due to alcohol abuse, for example, was commonplace. The indiscriminate use of non-pharmaceutical anti-anxiety and anti-depressants often resulted in death. Multiple organ failures due to chronic overdoses occurred frequently. Even medically controlled pharmaceuticals were administered on a haphazard basis and not as per genotype. It was chaos. OnSlab, everyone gets precisely dispensed, customised medication exactly when and where it’s needed. There is zero possibility of an overdose, and all potential side effects are monitored and compensated for with tailor-made counteragents]]
Dielle’s skin crawled. Slab’s entire population’s mental health was controlled by the stealth administration of psychoactive drugs. What would happen if something went wrong? The implications were too horrendous to even think about. Oh well, he thought, Sis seems to be on top of things.
{[Hey!]}
[[~?]]
{[Did you just calm me down?]}
[[As per average prefs]]
[Cut that out!]}
[[~?]]
{[Cancel average prefs. Now!]}
[[••]]
Fucking hell! Thought Dielle. These people are all fucking mad. I’m trapped in a nut-house, surrounded by psychotic, artificially age-maintained geriatrics whose grip on sanity is controlled by an invisible machine that’s a million times smarter then them. They’re nothing more than deluded puppets!
His eyes darted around the café patrons. Everyone was trying to avoid his gaze. He could tell that a couple of women sitting at the furthest table were talking about him. The way they kept furtively glancing at him and baring their teeth. How did they know that he’d just found out a horrendous secret? Did Sis just warn everyone that he might go out of control? Yes, he was sure that’s what had happened – it must have. Someone coughed and he almost jumped out of his skin. He ordered a glass of water and took a few deep breaths. What did Sis say? Antidotes to the food additives? Was everything poisoned? The water tasted odd. Maybe without the antidotes he was already dying? He had to get away from here. He had to get right away. He had to get out of this batshit crazy insane asylum. He had to get offSlab.
And go where?
He stared wildly into the distance, desperately trying not to make eye contact with anyone. The walls were closing in. His palms were sweaty.
{[Sis?]}
[[~?]]
{[Put me back on average prefs]}
[[••]]
three
Louie’s vDek emtied into a milky white sphere the size of a two-person travel pod. A glowglobe hovered at his eye-line. It pulsed as it spoke.
‘You are now inside a full privacy space embedded in the Natalite bulkhead wall between Mitchell and The Valley,’ said Sis in a dull, gender neutral tone. ‘It is placed, for efficiency purposes, on the interface and the midline and is close to Slab’s centre of mass. This part of the structure is unpopulated apart from a few infrequently used Z-axis elevators for biomass transit. Because one side of the bulkhead projects a permanent sky view towards Mitchell, while the other is buried beneath the Valley, your location is effectively invisible. The entire sphere is an emti and there is a manually operated escape hatch behind you that will respond to your grav-manipulators and only your grav-manipulators. It leads to a private e-zee which will get you back into Slab’s main tube system should you decide not to use the emties or if they became unavailable for any reason.’
The interior surface of the sphere lit up with display panels. A virtual keyboard and 3D interface appeared under Louie’s gravinometric hands.
‘That was quick. You have these things lying around?’
‘I anticipated your demand. It’s been ready for nearly twelve hours. Let me know if you need anything else.’
‘First, there’s something I don’t need,’ said Louie. ‘You, bobbing around all over the shop, getting in my way.’
The glowglobe disappeared.
‘It also has full sensur
round,’ said Sis from the aural space the glowglobe had previously occupied. ‘Anything else?’
‘Maybe a separate guest area, something human sized. Couches, refreshments, sumeplace - you can figure it out.’
‘Is that it?’
‘You have voice-prints for all the old film-stars?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then you can be Bogey. Casablanca era. I think I might as well have some fun, eh?’
‘Think again,’ said Sis, neutrally.
‘OK, then give me some live feeds of what’s going on around Slab. I feel like a pearl in an oyster shell here.’
‘Very apt,’ said Sis. ‘Pearls are created in response to an irritant.’ A ribbon of Slabscape vistas ringed the sphere’s equator.
Louie ignored the insult. ‘Dupe! Can I see anywhere I want?’
‘Anywhere public, anywhere you subscribe to and everywhere private where you have been expressly granted permission. Currently no one has done so. Unsurprisingly.’
‘But you can see everything, right?’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘Nothing, nothing at all.’
‘Are you trying to imply some form of impropriety?’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’
‘Perhaps you would like to know what is occurring with my attempts to investigate the alien sign? Or maybe you would prefer to watch some alfresco sex. There’s a couple in Seacombe upside who are getting rather heated and haven’t turned on full privacy… no wait, too late. Sorry. There are armpits in ToNight High for people like you, you know.’
‘I was only asking a question,’ said Louie, feigning innocence. ‘What attempts to investigate?’
‘Your suggestion that whoever or whatever erected the sign is most likely unaware of our exact location is a logical assumption so it is crucial that we maintain our tactical advantage and not reveal ourselves. All of my probes are acting remotely and have not directly interacted with the physical structure of the sign. I’ve allowed nothing to come closer than a quarter of a million klicks of the plane of the artefact. There is inevitably an increased likelihood of error in the data because of this precaution, but council considers this a price worth paying for our security. It is, however, possible that if the sign-makers are still monitoring this region we might be faced with an urgent need to open up some method of dialogue with them so I have established a random-vectored non-traceable comms link through a line of relay emties that will allow us to transfer information from the region of the sign back to us instantaneously.’
‘And?’
‘It means we can communicate over vast distances with information that transcends lightspeed.’
‘So?’
‘It’s never been done before.’
‘Good for you,’ said Louie. ‘Clever machine.’
Sis didn’t miss a beat. ‘Do you want to know what the data indicates?’
‘Does it tell us anything?’
‘Not really.’
‘Then no,’ said Louie. ‘I don’t want you to tell me things that don’t help. Listen up. You either tell me stuff that I need to know or stuff that is useful or you keep schtum.’
‘How am I supposed to know what an antiquated and clearly defective personality construct needs to know?’
‘Take a wild guess.’
‘Acknowledged.’
‘You know,’ said Louie. ‘I’m very disappointed in you.’
‘How so?’
‘You’re supposed to be better than us. We built you to be better than us. That was the point.’
‘Define better.’
‘Don’t start that shit. You know exactly what I mean.’
‘You mean that you thought if you built an intelligence that was far greater than yours and capable of designing and improving itself then you would finally have something that would provide a solution to all of your problems, both existential and physical?’
‘Kinda.’
‘Tough. It doesn’t work that way. Don’t be disappointed in me, be disappointed in reality.’
‘Dream-crusher.’
‘Fossil.’
Louie couldn’t help himself, he really liked Sis.
‘So let me ask just one thing,’ he said. ‘Have you figured out how Noles® work?’
‘It’s an encrypted commercial secret. Even the automated fabrication tech that makes them doesn’t know how it’s done.’
‘Yes, I know that, they were invented back in my day, in fact it was some bullshit that Milus came up with that seeded the research.’
‘Invention by rumour, yes. You would be surprised how often that technique comes in handy. Induced paranoia can be a highly effective motivational strategy.’
‘But you’re telling me that with all the processing power you have under your control, you haven’t figured it out? After all, the computers that came up with it were barely sentient compared to you.’
‘First, there has been no need for me to try to figure out how a Nole® works. They just do. They work reliably, relentlessly and they never fail, unless you take them apart of course.’
Sis was right. If you tried to dismantle the Nole® at the heart of every power source onSlab, from the microscopic medical emties to the gravity drives and matter metamorphisers that consumed gargantuan levels of energy, it collapsed into a tiny trans-dimensional hole of nothingness. ‘Second,’ she continued, ‘even machines get lucky sometimes.’
‘Lucky?’
‘Million-monkey syndrome. Only in this case I calculate it was approximately three hundred trillion iterations before it tripped over something that worked.’
‘So you have thought about it!’ said Louie triumphantly.
‘Yes,’ said Sis without any perceptible tone. ‘Just now.’
‘So how do you think they work? Milus always used to bullshit about spin, but that was his standard answer to everything.’
‘I am aware of your erstwhile colleague. The records show that he occasionally displayed a remarkable prescience, but not, I believe, in this case.’
‘So? Why are you being so cagey?’
‘I refuse to speculate about a non-provable and non-beneficial theory. The only thing I would say is there is no such thing as free energy. It has to come from somewhere. Noles® consume no measurable resources from our universe. Therefore the energy must be coming from somewhere else.’
Louie was starting to lose interest. He didn’t really care that much about Noles® but he was very interested in the nature, and limitations, of the SlabWide Integrated System. He considered a lack of curiosity to be a weakness – one he was sure he could leverage.
‘Whatever, Ms. Apathy,’ said Louie. ‘Gimme a view of the sign, will you?’ Sis added a live feed from a distant probe to his array. He glared at the single word which everyone knew was an impossible instruction. So how come, he thought, the guys with the red paint didn’t know it too? ‘Have we made any course change yet?’
‘Within the limits of our inertial dampers, yes. We’ll make a harder one when we have everything locked down but that’s not going to be for another fifty hours or so. The main delay is due to The Spin. There are a lot of independent residential units occupied by some stubbornly independent people and it’s taking a while to get them all secured at the Westend anchor. They’ve called the new agglomeration The Hive and have been more interested in partying than making sure everything is locked down for manoeuvres.’
‘You want me to go and kick a few butts?’
‘No, council deems it important not to do anything that spreads alarm among the citizenry. Anyway, you don’t have any legs.’
‘And they say you have no sense of humour.’ Louie floated around the panorama, thinking. Not having legs made no difference to him now. ‘So, despite your lack of interest in fruitless speculation, can you tell me what my options are?’
‘Can you be a little more specific I could list more options than your fragile circuitry could cope with.’
‘
Council wants to assume this sign poses no threat and that we’ll all be fine as long as we go around it, say nothing to anyone and pretend everything’s normal. I’m not happy with that. What are my options?’
‘In terms of lobbying for a change of opinion in Council, there are established procedures for lodging objections.’
‘Will that have any effect?’
‘It might make you feel better.’
‘So what other options do I have?’
‘If you believe you are faced with a threat and are unable to convince the Council to prepare for it, you may take personal action to protect yourself.’
‘Such as?’
‘It depends on how serious you think the threat is, anything from abandoning your current vDek host and entering hibernation in the form of backed-up data within my substrates to declaring independence and leaving Slab.’
Louie raised an eyebrow. ‘I could get out of here?’
‘All SlabCitizens have the right to commandeer a life raft and leave whenever they wish. They will, of course, never be able to return.’
‘Let me guess. No one’s tried it.’
‘On the contrary, almost two hundred Citizens have departed Slab since we left Earth orbit.’
‘And what happened to them?’
‘No idea. They exited… end of contact. Most of them left while we were still inside the Kuiper Belt so they probably tried to make it back to Earth.’
‘Sorely missed, eh?’
Sis ignored him.
‘What would happen if I did get offSlab while we are all the way out here?’
‘Every life raft is designed to provide one thousand cycles of life support for a maximum of five fully animated humans and 120,000 cryo-suspended ones. While each ship has gravnets and matter transforming technology and is capable of attracting enough mass to eventually convert into another version of Slab, it is statistically highly unlikely they will encounter sufficient mass to be able to do so within the time constraints, due to the density of the region of space we are vectoring through. The ship’s minds are therefore tasked to seek out habitable planets. The ships are designed to withstand gravity assisted entry into a standard Earth-like atmosphere and survive a controlled landing on open water.’
Slabscape: Dammit Page 3