‘We have consensus reality,’ said Fencer. ‘Can we move on?’ He handed Dielle a mist-topped vial. ‘What did he want? You two looked like you were having a good old time.’
‘Yeah, A’s quite a comedian,’ said Dielle, barking.
Twopoint looked dubious. ‘A? He told you to call him A?’
It was too late to retreat. ‘Yeah, all his friends call him that apparently,’ said Dielle. ‘Why are you guys so excited? He’s just some guy who got rich playing games, isn’t he?’
His friends all looked at each other, wondering where to start.
‘You don’t get it,’ said Fencer, ‘guys like him spend every moment of their lives totally immersed in incredibly intricate game matrices. They can’t afford to disconnect - ever - so whatever he wanted to see you about must have been really important.’
‘Like mega-dicing-important, mate.’
Dielle detected a new level of respect.
[[•]]
I bet I know what that is, thought Dielle. {[Proceed]}
[[‘Darling! I’m sure you’re busy telling everyone anything but the truth about what Nokokyu wanted. Some friends have invited me to a private dinner so I’ll see you back home later. You can give me the skinny then. Oodles!’]]
I’d better start rehearsing, thought Dielle. ‘We’re related,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Blocks!’
‘For Dicesake!’
‘It’s true, or at least he says it is. Some distant cousin of Louie’s is apparently the main gene donor for his family line. We were just doing some good ol’ family-style catching up.’
Everyone queried Sis’s genealogy databases. It checked out. Of course it did, thought Dielle, anyone who owns an entire section of Slab and personally controlled the lives of eight million total immersion gamers shouldn’t have any problem getting a few family trees hacked.
‘So why did he want to talk to you and not Louie, mate?’
‘First, because Louie is an old-fashioned hologram and therefore nothing more than an unsophisticated computer program which, to somebody like A, is like having a conversation with a clock. And second, because have you met Louie?’ Everyone shook their heads. ‘Well, if you had, you’d wish you hadn’t.’
‘So are you going to see A-un again then?’ asked Twopoint. ‘You know, like for close family get-togethers and so on?’
Dielle still wasn’t tuned into onSlab sarcasm. ‘I don’t know, maybe I guess.’
‘Yeah mate,’ said Mate, reaching into an emti for five more Dog Breaths. ‘Sure you are.’
five
Louie was in his element. Literally. The main bridge of the escape ship was holographic and sentient. Its default configuration was a blank, egg-shaped space, large enough to comfortably accommodate the ship’s intended crew of five. The walls were lined with hi-tensile morfome that could expand and transform into consoles, work surfaces and crash webbing, which meant that the bridge was not so much a virtual reality as a multi-reality. The crew could select their own holographic ‘skins‘ which were point-of-view projected so that each crew member could have their working environment customised to their personal needs and tastes without impinging on their neighbours’ experiences. All downs and soundfields were local to the morfome workstations and, as the entire space was an emti, anything the crew required could be placed under their hands as fast as they could send an eye-command to the ship’s mind.
A pool of morfome was suspended in the centre of the bridge and used as a focal point around which the crew could work and share information.
Louie liked to pace. He also liked to dribble. He told himself it helped him think. It also helped to burn off some of his excess irritation that otherwise might manifest as something less socially acceptable, and had the added benefit of presenting a moving target to his enemies, so he’d instructed Sis to establish a single down and turn the floating morfome into a court floor with a basket and back-board at the narrower end of the chamber. The opposite end was lined with dozens of viewscreens.
The escape ship was essentially a space-tug. It was shaped like a snub-nosed artillery shell and had four forward-facing and four backward-facing gravity drives that looked as though they had been bolted on as an afterthought. It plugged the space-end of a kilometre-long, fifty-metre-wide shaft that had been drilled out of the natalite. Louie’s ship was embedded in the port-side wall near the centre of Slab and was one of more than 500 similar life-rafts. Every escape ship had twenty-four cryo-units attached to it in banks of four. Each unit was 150 metres long, 15 metres square and had enough rack-space to house 5,000 frozen bodies. At full load, the ship could be launched into space like a bullet from a rifle, hauling 120,000 oblivious SlabCitizens behind it.
There were twice as many escape ships than were needed by the current population of Slab. This double redundancy philosophy was echoed in almost every design detail. There was a second, mechanically based bridge equipped with five, independent, escape pods buried deep in the ship’s underbelly. Every item of essential equipment was duplicated or in some cases triplicated and almost everything could be manually overridden.
There was plenty of space for the crew. There were five lounges, each furnished in a different style, a gym with a zero-G swimming torus that encircled the ship, two dining rooms, three bars, a separate ‘freight recycling’ section and a cavernous hold stacked with supplies and spares. The crew’s personal quarters were multi-configurable suites capable of supporting long-term isolation, although because each member of the highly-trained standby crew had been specifically chosen for their social as well as their competency profiles and matched as a functioning team since leaving the farm, they were not expected to need to be separated. But then, unpredictable events can occur on multi-thousand-cyke journeys. It’s best to be prepared.
Sis told Louie that, if it came to it, the ship could be flown manually, although if it was launched from Slab at their current velocity, and the gravnets had failed, that option would have a 96.34% probability of failure within the first 200 nanoseconds.
Sis had populated Louie’s screens with his personal selections of on- and off-Slab views. Floating holographic data windows surrounded his peripheral vision. He had never felt so at home. He was dribbling and wondering what nefarious use he could make of 120,000 coffin-sized cryo-suspension units when Sis interrupted his machinations.
‘We’ve lost all of the sensors nearest the sign.’
‘When?’
‘4.25 seconds ago. All of our probes within half a million click radius just vanished.’
‘Zapped? Something targeted them?’
‘Impossible to say. Nothing observable from outside that event horizon. Everything within that radius, except for the sign, has disappeared without trace.
‘Any chance it’s just an automated spring-clean of the neighbourhood? Something that protects the sign?’
‘Possible. I detected no incoming external signal that might have triggered the response but as the sign’s surface area is over six billion billion square kilometres, I can’t guarantee data integrity.’
‘That’s great,’ said Louie. He threw the ball angrily at the basket and missed. ‘So we still don’t have any idea who did this or where they are but now it’s possible that they know we’ve found their sign?’
‘If the event wasn’t simply automated garbage collection and the sign makers are still around to monitor things then they are going to start searching for us but we’re going to be near-impossible to find. From their point of view, Slab is a microscopic black needle hidden in a billion kilometre-wide black haystack. It would be like searching for a boson in a black hole. But in the remote possibility that they do manage to find us they should be able to detect our recent course change and that we are not slowing down, which they might interpret as antagonistic. Our best hope is that they won’t even see us until it’s far too late for them to take action.’
Louie checked his live feed of the sign. As he
watched, the white letters morphed into one massive, unmistakable symbol: ‘!’
‘Fuck!’ Said Louie. ‘What’s our second-best hope?’
Louie’s text screens flooded with frantic inter-intern communications and Sis’s speech rate ramped up.
‘We could assume that they will not know who or what is inside Slab or have any way of finding out. Fifty kilometre-thick walls of diamond nano-rods present a considerable barrier to any imaginable technology. We also have a significant array of external defences.’
‘Do you mean real defences or those pretend defences you made us figure out ways to circumvent?’ Louie wasn’t ready to forget that Sis had played imaginary hide-and-seek with everyone over FutureSlab.
‘Those systems were real,’ said Sis. ‘And the methods we invented for defeating them have now been closed off and our defences reinforced as a consequence. That is how innovation and progress is made: through adversity, urgency and need.’
‘Yeah, you feel good about it anyway you can.’
‘I do not seek your approval.’
‘That’s handy ’ said Louie, glaring at the exclamation mark.
It didn't take long for the SlabCouncil’s communications to distil into impasse. The NAHs were using the intern channel to lobby for drastic action to avoid the sign but had, so far, been unable to sway enough of the council members, many of whom were becoming irritated and entrenched.
After a while it was obvious to Louie that the only thing Council was going to agree on was to disagree. ‘Do you think our defences are capable of fending off attacks from whatever bug-eyed monsters are out there with their mega-zappo-blasters and maxi-nukes or whatevers aimed at us?’ He asked Sis.
‘Impossible to know and a waste of time speculating about it. The technology used to create and install the sign is not so far beyond ours that, given the time and motivation, we couldn’t come up with a reasonable facsimile of it. Therefore it is possible that our technology is not so outclassed that our defences would be completely useless. After all, 180 billion megatons of mass moving at very nearly light speed is a considerable weapon in itself. The kinetic energy alone is a formidable threat to anyone who stands in our way.’
Louie read a few more comments. ‘The NAHs don’t seem so sanguine about it. They’re demanding an embodied meeting.’
‘Yes, I know. I suppose we’ll have to have one. Are you coming?’
‘Nah, I’ve met enough wizards to last me multiple lifetimes. I’ll attend from here.’
‘Wise choice.’
Louie had had a firm rule about company meetings when he was in charge: anyone who called one got fired. It didn’t stop people having meetings of course, they just did it behind his back, which was fine by him.
The SlabCouncil met in a cathedral-shaped cavern formed from fluffy, white clouds, a virtual space that Sis had created for the purpose of the debate. Very appropriate, thought Louie. He tuned in from his escape ship for as long as he could bear it but he could predict the outcome of the meeting after the first two speakers. He reckoned they’d have reached the same result if they’d foregone the debate and simply tabled a motion saying that they didn’t know what to do.
‘This ship?’ said Louie.
‘Yes?’
‘Does it have any conventional engines in addition to the gravity drives?’
‘Twin plasma ion drives and a couple of dozen mass-reactant thrusters.’
‘Warm them up, will you?’
six
Dielle, Fencer and Fingerz had arranged to meet at a NowThen on the Strip because they wanted to discuss band matters in private. In this instance, private meant away from the attention of Pundechan Media’s rapidly expanding network of roving nano-eyes. NowThens were hackerdomains and were continually updated with the latest and most secure shielding technology onSlab but Dielle was still worried that Kiki would find a way to eavesdrop.
Fencer countered with some nano-tech of his own. He misted Dielle’s eyes with a clear spray. ‘Did everything go green?
Dielle nodded, blinking.
‘That’s confirmation you’re in a C-cure environment’, said Fencer. ‘It’ll turn red if the security’s compromised. It’s not that we’re not grateful for the publicity, but there are some things we really should keep under wraps until at least we know what we’re doing. There’s already a huge buzz about the band and we haven’t even got a name yet.’
‘Howabout Cool Hands?’ said Dielle.
‘Let’s loosen the newies,’ said Fingerz. ‘I fixed a room for us round the back.’
Fencer and Dielle had both woken up that morning with a couple of Fingerz’ part-composed songs in their heads and they were keen to give them an airing. Fingerz had already emtied in a pair of keys from his personal collection so he and Dielle sat facing each other over a café table while Fencer perched on a chair far enough from everything to prevent accidents. Fencer’s instrument was a holographic array of projected surfaces coupled to a FeelGood® feedback responder that jacked directly into his neural interface. Only his sticks were real. When he hit the projected images of drum skins, cymbals and percussion, the interface produced a response in his brain that made his hands, arms and feet react as though they had struck real surfaces. Timbre, tuning, response and decay were all under eye-control.
Air drummers were fascinating to watch because they could, and therefore frequently did, instantaneously reconfigure their drum kits as they were playing. and because there was no impact stress, they could play for hours without tiring. Fortunately, drums solos lasting more than twenty minutes were proscribed under the AntiSocial Offences List.
Dielle listened to the three of them performing their new pieces for the first time and was mesmerised. It felt to him like something magical was happening. Fingerz extemporised a solo that only his own neocortex, backed by over a century of experience, understood. Fencer held a delicate syncopation and Dielle closed his eyes and let everything flow. He had found his purpose in his new life. He was filled with joy.
When he opened his eyes again his companions were staring at him. They finished the piece with a complicated breakdown and sat looking at him quizzically.
Fingerz scratched his beard and looked uncomfortable. ‘The Dice was that, man?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Dielle.
‘That noise you were making,’ said Fencer.
‘What noise?’
‘You were like humming or something, man.’
‘Not me.’
‘Moaning,’ said Fencer. ‘Out of key.’
‘No way.’
‘Not just out of key, man,’ said Fingerz. ‘You weren’t even in the universe of keys, you were like dimensions away from anything anyone could even remotely call a key, man.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Dielle, requesting playback.
A lush, multi-textured sound filled the room. It sounded fine to Dielle until they reached Fingerz’ solo. A tuneless human whine swam above the melody.
‘That’s not me.’
‘Yes it is.’
‘Man!’
‘Are you sure?’
Fencer and Fingerz nodded.
Dielle reddened. ‘I had no idea, I mean I was just into the music, I guess I must have wandered off somewhere,’
‘I have never heard anything like that man!’
‘Sorry.’
‘Sorry?’ said Fingerz. ‘It’s great!’
‘What?’
‘No one onSlab can do what you just did,’ said Fencer
‘What? Wail out of tune?’
‘Yeah, no one, man,’ said Fingerz. ‘You’re unique. It’s like a special gift or something.’
Dielle was confused. ‘A gift?’
‘More like a gift deficit,’ said Fencer. ‘Perfect pitch is a genetically inherited trait. Everyone onSlab has it by default.’
‘Yeah, no one would deliberately choose to give their offspring tone-deafness, would they?’ said Fingerz, shaking with excit
ement. Unfettered enthusiasm wasn’t an emotion he displayed too often and it was taking its toll. He pulled out a shiff and calmed down inside his own cloudy PersonalSpace.
‘You mean I’m the only person onSlab who sings out of key?’ said Dielle.
‘Well,’ said Fencer, ‘I wouldn’t exactly describe that as singing, but…’
‘What you think to The Sophists of Nevermore?’ said Fingerz.
‘Whatabout The Twenty Twenty Visionaires?’ said Fencer. ‘You know, like you’ve got twenty fingers between you and my DoName Main is…’ he trailed off when he saw the no-one-at-home faces staring past him.
‘This is going to be wild,’ said Fingerz. ‘Wait till the citz get a load of Dielle’s anti-vibes!’
‘I think I’ll need a stage name,’ said Dielle, feeling uncomfortable with the sudden focus on his hitherto hidden talents.
‘You think you can do it again?’ asked Fencer.
‘What? Sing tunelessly? Seems like I don’t have much choice.’
Fingerz played the intro to the piece but stopped after two bars. ‘We should have a name for this song.’
‘We can’t agree on a name for the dicing band and you want to name the songs?’ said Dielle.
‘Give them numbers,’ said Fencer. ‘One, two, three, five, eight and so on.’
‘What?’ said Dielle.
‘Fibonacci, the most beautiful sequence of numbers there is,’ said Fencer.
‘OK,’ said Fingerz. ‘We’ll go with your numbers for the numbers but you don’t get to name the band with any.’
Fencer shrugged. ‘OK, cool with me.’ He counted in Piece One.
They played it twice more. Each time they played, Fingerz developed his solos and each time he soloed Dielle lost himself and let loose a wavering, vocal anti-tune that would have curled wallpaper. Fortunately, the only wallpaper onSlab was behind anti-tamper suprastrate in museums.
They were experimenting with a stylised breakdown to fade when they were interrupted [:NowThen collapse one minute:].
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