Slabscape: Dammit

by S. Spencer Baker

  They entered an underwater tunnel and half a minute later were being helped out of the bug by mannequin avatars with short skirts, white boots and fixed smiles. Three more bugs popped up from the black water into the cavernous dock as Kiki and Dielle were herded onto a moving walkway that led them up to pre-screening. Kiki sighed when she saw the line of dark-suited well-muscled men and women waiting to greet them.

  ‘Hang on,’ she said to Dielle. ‘This won’t take long.’ She took off her boots and gave them to the nearest security operative. He put them into what looked to Dielle like a standard emti. Something snapped and fizzed inside the cabinet then the security guy retrieved the boots and offered them back. They had two large smoking holes in their stack heels. She shook her head and pointed at the next emti that had a pair of red platform shoes waiting for her. He threw the spoiled black boots into the emtitrash and gave her the red ones. She slipped them on and moved towards the main exit. With impressive speed, the guy was standing in front of her, arms folded, waiting.

  ‘What? You invite media and then don’t let us do our job?’

  ‘Madam,’ said the security guy, looking down at her in every possible way. ‘You were not invited. Your asset was. You have been granted limited access rights because you are his temporary sexual partner.’ He reached out, palm upwards.

  Kiki sighed again and plucked two pins from the back of her head. Both were topped with black beads the size of her little fingernail. She handed them over and they followed the ruined boots.

  ‘Nice dress,’ said the guy. ‘Woodham Grey?’

  ‘Yes,’ she sulked.

  ‘Expensive.’

  ‘It’s a rental.’

  He still wasn’t moving.

  ‘Madam,’ he said. ‘You do know that we design and manufacture this tech, don’t you?’

  ‘For Dicesake!’ said Kiki. She squatted down and reached to pick up a thumb-sized glistening egg from the floor. She tried to give it to the operative but he refused, indicating its destination with his eyes. She threw it into the emtitrash.

  ‘Welcome to Happenstance,’ said the man standing aside. His smile was a flatline.

  Kiki sucked air through her teeth and grabbed Dielle’s arm angrily. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s find out who your sumers are going to miss. By the looks of this setup it’s probably going to be Troy dicing Tempest.’

  Kiki didn’t do bad moods. By the time they’d reached the reception floor she was ready to party again. Fencer was waiting for them and led them through the deep-sea observation lounge to a wide vexit that tubed them up to the main smooze where their table was set into a soundproofed alcove. Mate, Twopoint and Thal were already there and hitting the Rat 5s. They all stared appreciatively at Kiki’s dress and made her feel special and then moaned in pretence when she told them she’d been pinged by a couple of ‘close personal friends’ so she was going to leave Dielle in their company and see them later. They all watched her sway off through the tables and loungers that littered the guest area of the mansion.

  ‘You really are one lucky son of a bastard, mate,’ said Mate. He threw back his drink, screwed up his eyes and barked in Dielle’s face.

  The evening progressed as alcohol-fuelled evenings tend to. Whenever Dielle caught sight of Kiki she was talking to somebody new and each time she was the focus of attention, laughing and enjoying herself. He stayed with his friends and got happily ratted. Fencer had immediately taken to the idea of forming a band, which had prompted everyone to suggest names. Every suggestion was, without exception, called out as a crap idea within a few barks. Fencer was pleased because he’d been looking for something extra to do now that AllWeather was filling with snow. At least, he said, it might solve his problem with the non-stick mountains.

  No one seemed concerned about the course change.

  ‘These things happen,’ said Fencer. ‘You can’t expect to set a straight line course over twenty thousand lightyears and there not be something in the way.’

  ‘Does anyone know what it is?’ asked Dielle.

  ‘It’s a rogue gas giant’ said Thal.

  ‘I heard it’s five asteroid-sized rocks in a Klemperer Rosette with no central mass. That’s why we didn’t detect them until a few days ago,’ said Twopoint. ‘There’s too much mass for us to capture and not enough room between them for us to get through safely.’

  ‘Nah, nah, nah mate,’ said Mate. ‘Black hole, mate’

  ‘Black hole? Out here?’ said Fencer. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Yeah mate, it’s a teensy weensy black hole no bigger than a thumbnail. Apparently it’s travelling through the spiral arm from above, has the mass of a hundred Sols and would swallow us up in a millisecond if we got within five and half million klicks of the bastard.’

  ‘And who told you that?’ asked Thal.

  ‘My lips are sealed, mate.’

  ‘Wish they bloody were,’ said Twopoint. ‘Asteroids to you.’ He jerked backwards. ‘Jesus Christ! Is that who I think it is?’

  Everyone turned to look where Twopoint was staring. Dielle couldn’t see anyone special, just a slight young guy with medium-length fair hair and large, child-like eyes. He was dressed in scruffy blue denim and was hobbling around, nodding hellos to people. The party-goers made space for him as though he needed a lot more room than everyone else. He spotted Fencer and moved towards him with a stilted gait.

  ‘Fen-cer Dee-een Twen-ty’ he said. ‘Long ti-me n-see.’

  Fencer took his hand and guided him to the table. He moved in small, interrupted spurts.

  ‘Guys,’ said Fencer, smiling broadly, ‘I’d like to introduce you to A-un Nokokyu.’ He steered him into a seat.

  The new arrival responded directly to each person as Fencer introduced them. ‘Thal. Like you-r work. Nice dou-ble re-peat on that can-yon Up-side Mit-chell.’

  Thal beamed, speechless.

  ‘Two-point,’ continued A-un. His eyes never rested on what they were looking at. ‘Cool it-er-a-tion on that Phi field effect. You could think a-bout un-sub-ing the trip-ple point. Tigh-ter ‘fyou un-load each reg-ist-er as you loop the pack-et.’

  Twopoint longazed for a moment. ‘Dicesake! Why didn’t I see that? Jeez, man, thanks!’

  ‘Mate,’ said A-un. ‘Yeah.’

  Dielle thought about trying one of Fingerz’ complicated hand rituals but checked himself when he saw A-un lift his glass to drink. The guy couldn’t do anything without some form of weird stutter affecting everything he did.

  ‘Di-elle,’ said A-un, smiling blankly. His eyes continually tracked the horizontal, pausing for a fraction of a second each time they met Dielle’s. ‘I was ho-ping to me-et you. You are an in-ter-est-ing ex-per-i-ment I thi-nk.’

  Experiment? Thought Dielle. {[Who the fuck is this guy?]}

  [[A-un Nokokyu is the cognitive reality designer and rights holder of four of the top five total immersion gaming environments onSlab. He is also the inventor of the time-slip game interface, the no-future gaming strategy and originated the play-to-play business model that dominates all Neural Interface Massively Multi-player Total Immersion Role Playing Games onSlab. He is also the longest running consecutive SlabWide grand slam NIMMTIRPG tournament champion in history. In gaming circles, legends refer to him as legend]]

  {[Why does he speak and move like that?]}

  [[He is currently immersed in 27 separate in-game scenarios, 21 of which involve immediate conflict, 10 of those are one on one combat]]

  Dielle could tell by the deference the other guys were showing to A-un that he’d just met the reason for all the heightened security. ‘Nice place,’ he said, trying to think of something non-controversial. ‘Is it yours?’

  A-un looked around jerkily. ‘No, I do not thi-nk so. Well, yes of cour-se but.’

  {[~?]}

  [[A-un was the original Valley developer and sole leaseholder. His holding corporation sub-leases to the corporate and private tenants. This residence is leased by a publicly owned gaming corp
oration which is affiliated to one of his corporations but not directly controlled by him]]

  {[He built the whole valley?]}

  [[••]]

  {[All 350 klicks of it?]}4

  [[355]]

  Dielle tried a different approach. ‘I er… I’ve never actually played any of your games.’

  ‘Real-ly? How can you be su-re?’ said A-un. His head twitched twice. ‘I-m sor-ry, I am ve-ry po-or at sma-ll-talk. Can we poss-ib-ly in-ter-act pri-vate-ly?’

  ‘Sure, I guess,’ said Dielle.

  ‘A plea-sure to me-et you all,’ said A-un. He looked at Fencer and nodded. Fencer helped A-un out of his seat, indicating to Dielle with a swift glance that he should follow. Dielle shadowed A-un’s faltering progress to the French windows and out onto a balcony overlooking the black lake. They relaxed onto formchairs and Dielle took a fresh drink from a side emti. Somehow another Dog Breath hadn’t seemed appropriate so he’d ordered a Rat2 Ginis.

  ‘Do you mi-nd if we use sub-chan-nel?’ said A-un. ‘Voi-ce comms ex-haust me.’

  ‘No, no, whatever you want,’ said Dielle. His curiosity was making him edgy and A-un’s speech pattern was hard to follow.

  ‘I ne-ed to scan for yo-ur sub-legal. Can you se-nd out a ping?’

  {:Hello hello hello:} thought Dielle over his sub-legal channel.

  [:ID:] Even though his sub-legal channel was delivered by eye, it was integrated into his stim unit and had a notably different flavour.

  {:Are you on this same channel?:}

  [:I have cross-channel access. I apologise but I cannot tolerate being on remote for much longer. I’m losing too much time. I’ll tell you what I have in mind and you can think about my proposal. Please form your questions as quickly as possible. Any I can’t answer immediately will be responded to in due course. Nothing will be lost. You do not need to reply now. If you need to contact me you can leave a message on this channel but please be aware that it can take me several days to respond. For your information, there is a live real-time projection of the two of us talking being shown to the external observers. They will think we are laughing and joking. Despite this meeting being in total privacy and unrecorded, word will inevitably spread. The fact that you know me well enough to have a private conversation will have the effect of temporarily spiking your sume figures. You may be able to take advantage of this but they will most likely return to their current levels very quickly. I apologise for that but it is beyond my control. People will want to know what we talked about. I will send you a plausible scenario encoded in this feed’s sub-carrier and ask that you reveal only that, entirely fictional, conversation. It has verifiable data points and should stand up to scrutiny. I am not trying to coerce you and you have free choice but if you do choose to tell people the truth of our interaction then the venture I am about to propose will be devalued to our mutual detriment. OK so far?:]

  {:OK:} Dielle looked over at A-un. He was lying on his back, facing the silhouette of the distant triple helix that bisected the sky. His eyes were darting about furiously.

  [:I will be direct. I wish to talk to you about total immersion. You should understand that the only thing that matters in T.I. gaming is the quality of the experience. Every gamer’s experience is composed of sets of unique flavours which are a dynamic combination of twenty-three human senses overlaid by a complex filtering system that determines the way those senses interact with each other and are experienced by the individual. There are also a range of optional non-human senses such as echolocation, extra-spectrum, magnetoception, electro and so on that subscribers can choose to add on, but the basic template is, by necessity, human and it is that template that we strive to make completely authentic. We have, over hundreds of cykes, perfected ways to tune and finesse the sumer’s access to specific flavours and now have it so precisely mapped that the gamer’s experience is of actually being the characters they subscribe to. They don’t imagine they feel the same, they really do feel the same. They feel emotions, experience smells, colours, sounds, touch and so on exactly as if they were these supra-personalities. They have the same physical and psychological characteristics and react in exactly the same way that the original templates would. It’s all fed directly into the brain through gaming N.I.s which are like your stim unit only an order of magnitude more sophisticated. Are you following me?:]

  {:Sure. Is this stuff popular?:}

  [:We currently have over eight million subscribers to our total immersion titles:]

  {:Wow! So that’s like one in every four people here plays your games?:}

  [:Nobody here plays. If they did, they wouldn’t be here. Gamers, once immersed, very rarely disconnect:]

  {:But surely everyone does normal human living stuff too? Eating, drinking, going to parties, meeting people, getting laid. You know, life?:}

  [:As I said, they experience the game as the people they inhabit, and can switch between any number of templates so they can meet as many people and go to as many parties as they want - often simultaneously. The normal living stuff you refer to is handled by the T.I. environment. The interface simulates the experience of eating, drinking, sleeping, having sex, doing anything and everything the gamers choose and our systems emti in all the required nutrients and emti out all by-products. Muscles react as though they have actually done the work the brain thinks they have, taste-bud receptors in the brain respond to the in-game cuisine as if it were real, bodily functions are monitored and maintained. It’s very similar to the way you think you already live - only better and infinitely more varied:]

  {:They never disconnect?:}

  [:Why would they? It would have to be a very poorly designed game to be worse than reality:]

  That explains why Slab never felt crowded, thought Dielle, a quarter of the population don’t live here.

  {:So what do you want from me?:}

  [:Isn’t it obvious? Your flavour, your essence:]

  {:~~??:}

  [:We can design an infinite number of personality variations. The subscribers can modify and customise those designs and they often do, but unless the character templates are formed from real humans they don’t have the authenticity that gamers demand. You have to understand these people are fully immersed. This is their lives we are talking about. We currently employ actors to provide templates but they inevitably feel too familiar and mundane to the sumers. What they crave is difference and you are the most different young and healthy individual onSlab. Young and healthy matters. You were born on Earth over 1.2 KiloCykes ago and still have the behavioural tendencies and flaws, let’s call them characteristics, that have been removed from the onSlab gene pool. You are unique and flavourful. We are uniform and bland by comparison. That makes you priceless:]

  {:You want to link me up to millions of gamers so they can feel like I do?:}

  [:In a way. They won’t feel what you are doing, they’ll feel what they are doing in the T.I. but experience it as if they were you:}

  {:How’s it done?:}

  [:I can’t reveal that until you agree to do it but I can assure you that it’s not detrimental to you in any way and you will experience considerably less discomfort than when you had your stim unit insinuated:]

  Dielle tried to see if he could spot Kiki through the glass doors.

  {:I think you’ll have to talk to my agent. She seems to have the rights over everything I do:}

  [:Essence mining is not covered by your agreement with Ms Pundechan:]

  {:How do you know?:}

  [:Because there are only four entities onSlab who know it is possible and she is not one of them:]

  Dielle was conflicted. Here was an obvious opportunity to do something that would be his alone, but he felt completely out of his depth. Kiki was the ideal person to ask for help but if he did, he knew he’d end up feeling like a pawn again. What the hell was a pawn? he wondered.

  {:I need to think about it if that’s all right by you?:}

  [:I understand. We’d like to add you into to a
n upcoming major upgrade if possible so I’d ask you to consider it as a matter of some importance. However, we don’t have a primitive female counterpart available and there are no female resets from Earth left to be re-fammed. In fact, curiously, there never were any. So the upgrade will be gender-slanted I’m afraid, but I’m not going to pretend this wouldn’t give us a huge advantage over our competitors. You stand to make serious cred:]

  Three burly bodyguards entered the privacy space and helped A-un up from his couch. He’d visibly deteriorated during the conversation and was having trouble lifting his head. They carried him to the balcony’s edge and carefully installed him into a waiting stretch bug.

  Dielle guessed that he’d just been dismissed. {:Goodbye. See you again:}

  [:Goodbye. Thank you for your time. I should say that it is, however, highly unlikely that we will ever meet again. Well, not on this level anyway:]

  A-un’s transport melded silently into the darkness of the valley he owned but could barely perceive, while Dielle assimilated a fast feed of the conversation that had been fabricated for public consumption. He sounded completely realistic. His answers were exactly what he would have said in the circumstances. These games people are pretty adept, he thought. If they can already simulate me this well, how much better can it get? This essence mining might make the gamers more like me than I am.

  The projection field had shown a spritely A-un climbing into a bug and waving a cheery goodbye. The projected image of the security guys re-synched with reality and the field collapsed. Within seconds, Dielle’s four friends piled through the French doors.

  ‘Jeez! Mate,’ said Mate, ‘He never comes down to our level. What the Dice did he want?’

  Dielle wasn’t going to give it up that easily. ‘What do you mean our level?’

  ‘Reality,’ said Fencer.

  ‘You’re sure this is reality then?’ said Thall.

  ‘Shall I give you a bob on the noggin mate and see if it feels real to you?’

  ‘That’s no proof. Even if I experience pain and bleeding and all four of you witness it.’