‘What do you think, guys?’ asked Dielle while Fingerz was sending his keys back home.
‘Dicesake!’ said Fencer. ‘We’re going to be famous!’
[[•]]
{[~?]}
[[Voice message from Ms Pundechan]]
Dielle saw red. {[Tell her I’m rehearsing and I’ll ping her later]}
[[••]]
{[Hey, did she already know I was rehearsing?]}
[[What Ms Pundechan may or may not be aware of is subject to personal privacy]]
Dielle frowned. {[I’m trying to find out if my personal privacy is being invaded by someone else and you’re telling me that if it is, I can’t find out because that information is subject to personal privacy?]}
[[••]]
‘What’s up man?’ said Fingerz. ‘You already famous. Make no difference you-wise.’
‘Nah, it’s not that,’ said Dielle. ‘I just can’t get my head around some of your ways of doing things.’
‘Which ones?’ asked Fencer. ‘Maybe we can help you out.’
‘All this stuff about privacy and NowThens and personal preferences and being off presence-awareness and things like trying to find out if someone else knows something about me that I thought was private and not being able to find out because that information is private even though it’s information about me and sometimes if I’m trying to remember something I even have to pay to see what I’ve been doing because even though it’s not private it’s not public. It’s dicing with my head.’
Fingerz handed him a shiff.
‘Bottom line, you own your privacy,’ said Fencer. ‘You’ve got complete control and can decide exactly what you let people know. You can officially drop off system awareness and still be connected to Sis but no one else can find out where you are or what you’re doing – except if they’re actually with you – unless you give them permission. In those situations you still have all the normal protections and services that Sis provides. You can also go into dead zones, NowThens and other citizens’ personal privacy fields where you can be completely shielded from Sis so your body tech and so on is maintained by local firewalled systems that mimic Sis’s facilities without being linked to her, in which case you are private from everything except the local system which is under your privacy preference command. You can choose to be in full privacy and encoded but still let certain people know where you are and what you are doing without that information being available to anyone else, you can also attach your privacy rights to your private data that you allow others to know, and in your case you have an extra layer of privacy controls that are exercised by your production people so that they can decide what your sumers get to know about what you’re doing. You’ll have given them the permission to do all that of course because, as I said, you own your privacy.’
‘Thanks for making that clear,’ said Dielle.
‘Then you have privacy levels connected to what you communicate with Sis about, such as what you are querying and receiving and even thinking. Some people actually let that information out into the public domain, although Dice knows why. And then there is the privacy that other people have connected to the messages and interactions they have with you, because they also own their own privacy just like you do.’
‘Just stop, will you?’ said Dielle.
‘Then there is group privacy when something is owned jointly, like a new idea that came out of a conversation. Then there are levels of privacy and statutory availability when ideas or creative works are published that can actually get quite complicated. That leads us to intellectual property.’
‘If you don’t shut up I will break your sticks,’ said Dielle.
‘Beer time,’ said Fingerz.
[[•]]
{[~?]}
[[Ms Pundechan’s message has been set to re-try every five minutes until it’s delivered]]
‘Just got to take a message from Kiki,’ said Dielle.
{[OK, proceed]}
[[‘Darling!’]] He wondered why she always sounded as if she’d just won a prize. [[‘I’ve got a great name for your band and I had to tell you right away. Diellezebub! Great huh? See you later!’]]
‘What’d she want?’ asked Fingerz.
‘Nothing,’ said Dielle.
‘Hey,’ said Fingerz. ‘I’ve just got an invite to a set that’s about to start in ToNight High Downside. Friends of mine are playing. There’s a table waiting for us if we want it.’
‘Great,’ said Dielle.
‘Yeah, I’m in,’ said Fencer. ‘There’s an idea I’ve been working on that I want to discuss with you two anyway.’
‘Cool,’ said Fingerz. ‘Just tagalong. See you there.’ He waved, walked through a tube transvex and was gone. Fencer followed him seconds later.
{[Tagalong?]}
[[You wish to go to the same destination as J.A. Marley?]]
{[••]}
Dielle stepped through the vex.
ToNight High was one of the busiest and most vibrant regions of The Strip, which was a 355-kilometre corridor of everything imaginable, and several things that weren’t, that suited a night-time ambience. ToNight High specialised in human excess and reckless abandon and, like everywhere in The Strip, had tube vexits that delivered people onto the streets rather than directly into their destinations. It made for a thriving and boisterous street culture and forced people to interact with each other. It forced people to force people out of the way, too. Dielle pushed his way through the throng, following Sis’s visual prompts to the temporary venue. Along the way, he had a great idea for a name.
Inside, the musicians were going through the pre-gig ritual of checking things they already knew were working, adjusting things they had already re-adjusted and nodding to each other to convey meaning that none of them understood or cared about.
Dielle fought his way through the crowd to their table. ‘Hey,’ he said, breathless. ‘Howabout The Two Gether Three. That’s two as in the number.’
‘What does gether mean?’ said Fencer.
‘Does it matter?’ said Dielle.
‘Howabout Chastened Brethren of the Chastened Few,’ said Fingerz.
‘Been done,’ said Fencer.
‘Yeah, but they never got anywhere. We could re-use it.’
‘Recycled name?’ said Dielle. ‘People will think we’re not original.’
‘Man,’ said Fingerz. ‘Nothing is truly original. Everything comes from somewhere.’
The band started playing and laid down a rhythm that a caveman would have recognised. The three friends sat back, relaxed and enjoyed the music, each privately convinced that their music was better and fearful that it wasn’t. Out of professional respect they said nothing more until the band announced a break.
‘I’ll try to explain this in basic terms,’ said Fencer. Fingerz and Dielle caught each other’s eyes and sucked a couple of fresh shiffs to life.
As Fencer spoke he became agitated and stared at the table, squeezing his fingers in a complex sequence of twos and threes. ‘This is based on something I’ve been working on for a long time for a completely different purpose which I’m afraid I can’t tell you about but I’ve been thinking about it and I reckon we could make use of it for our music. It’s about time travel.’
‘Away man!’ said Fingerz. ‘No such thing!’
‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Fencer. ‘At least you are if you’re talking about sending something physical backwards in time. But you can send things sideways in time like we do with emties and of course everything moves forward in time usually at a rate of one second per second. But it’s also possible to send things into a future timeframe without going through the timeframes in between. That’s all normal special theory stuff and we’ve done that a lot. In fact we’re doing it right now simply by being here.’
Dielle’s mind wanted to think about something other than what Fencer was talking about and when Dielle’s mind wanted to think about something else, it thought about sex. The way the light reflected off th
e smooth fabric on a waitress’s ass as she moved among the variable tables held an irresistible fascination for him. ‘What? By being in this club?’ he asked.
‘Yes, by being in this club inside a spaceship that’s travelling at near lightspeed, time for us is moving at a different rate than it is for anyone left back on Earth. Or rather it’s moving at the same rate, but not for each other. Language gets complicated when you talk about time.’
‘So why are we?’ asked Dielle. The waitress had turned around, spotted Dielle and recognised him. Nice smile, he thought.
‘The thing is,’ said Fencer, ‘although you can’t send physical things backwards in time, you can, under the right circumstances send information. It’s all about entanglement.’
Dielle was already thinking about entanglement.
Fingerz was making an effort to stay with Fencer, but his eyes were heavy.
‘What you do is entangle quantum particles in the now with quantum particles from the past and if you can find a particle, better still, lot of particles that existed in the past, that is, of course, all particles existed in the past, all the way back to the Big Bang, right? But if you can entangle your bunch of particles with a bunch of particles that were at the right moment in time in the same physical space and linked to an information retrieval system and that system was programmed to interpret the quantum fluctuations in a meaningful way and output the information in a data structure that could be recognised by, say, a human being, then it would be relatively easy to send back information and do something with it, right?’
‘Obviously,’ said Dielle. He queried Sis about Fencer’s state of intoxication.
‘So it’s simple. All we have to do is find a whole load of particles that existed together in the right timeframe in the right environment and encode them with the data we want to send back and then we make a thoroughly impressive amount of money.’
Fingerz snapped back into focus. ‘What data?’
‘Our music of course!’
‘How do we make money out of sending our music back through time?’ asked Fingerz.
‘Well,’ said Fencer, ‘you have to send it back to a time when people bought music to own.’
‘String! You can’t own music. What the Dice are you on?’
‘No, you can, or rather could. People used to pay to own music.’
‘That’s ridiculous! How can you own something that doesn’t physically exist?’
‘Back at the end of the twentieth century they made copies of recorded music, transferred them onto physical objects and traded them like commodities.’
‘That’s disgusting!’
‘No, really. For a while it was the only way they could listen to what they wanted when they wanted. They used to carry them around.’
Fingerz was far outside his comfort zone. ‘You can’t own music man!’ he cried. ‘That like owning beauty or joy or love, Dicesake! I take no part in this!’ He reached for another shiff and retreated into his PersonalSpace while Fencer continued explaining his idea to Dielle.
‘There’s a small window of opportunity for us. Somewhere around the start of the twenty-first century on Earth, they were transitioning from owned to sumed. Recorded music was starting to be held in ubiquitous data storage that could be accessed by anyone with authorisation for consumption on a wide variety of connected devices. But before that it was just sumed normally and paid for as it was sumed. There was a brief moment, maybe fifteen years or so, when people would actually buy copies of the music data and keep that locally.’
Fingerz snorted. Fencer carried on, oblivious.
‘They paid and then sumed locally, you see? No microroyalties, just one, relatively large, in perpetuity rights payment. They owned it!’
‘And how does that make any difference to us?’ asked Dielle, barely following what was going on.
‘All we have to do is locate the right antique tech that used to be connected to the early twenty-first century global network, entangle our music with it, add instructions about its exploitation and who to pay and then our credit accounts explode!’ Fencer was wild-eyed.
Dielle was more than sceptical, he was bored. ‘But what if it’s not successful?’
‘Doesn’t matter. We only need to sell a handful of copies. Curiosity alone will ensure that happens. Ever heard of compound interest?’
Dielle queried Sis and got a brief lesson in historical financial practice while Fencer kept talking.
‘So we sell a few digital copies, pay some commission to the reseller, deposit the balance in a secure, long term interest-bearing account that gets transferred to Slab before departure into an account in our name and that money sits there gathering interest and waiting for us to be born or in your case re-fammed. That’s over four hundred years of compound interest. I reckon we could wind up with at least five million credits each for every ten copies we sell in the past.
There was a swift sucking sound and Fingerz reappeared. ‘Say what?’
‘I’ve just sent you both an example,’ said Fencer. ‘The figures are self-explanatory.’
Dielle and Fingerz longazed while Sis demonstrated the principle of principal accumulation to them.
‘And you can do this?’ said Dielle. ‘How?’
‘Look, I don’t want to be patronising but you really aren’t going to understand the physics. You can ask Sis to explain it to you but I platinum guarantee you are going to think the whole thing is blocks. I’ve been working on this for dozens of cykes and I still wake up some nights wondering if I’ve lost my mind. The basic process would be: we record a song and I get Sis to turn it into a binary code that’s compatible with the formats they used around the turn of the twenty-first century. Then we need to locate an artefact onSlab that was used in those days to connect to the data networks. Then I attach a program to the song data, which is basically a series of instructions of what it is and what to do with it and then entangle all that information with the particles from the past. Then, if it all works as planned, our credit accounts leap the moment we press send.’
‘So we are going to be famous in the past?’ asked Fingerz.
‘No, not famous, otherwise we would already be able to find some historical record of ourselves and there isn’t any. I’ve already checked. We were not famous in the past, but we may have been obscure and that’s fine because we really only need to sell a very small amount to make it work. The more obscure the better probably. You have to be careful with causality issues.’
‘So what type of artefact are we looking for?’ asked Dielle.
‘Some relic from the digital era. Doesn’t matter much what it is as long as it used to be connected to the global network of the time.’
‘Pleewo has a load of old stuff,’ said Dielle. ‘I’ve seen it.’
‘Man, I’m having nothing to do with that slimeshit wind farmer,’ said Fingerz with uncharacteristic intensity.
‘It’s either going to be him, the museums or the collectors,’ said Fencer. ‘Because the gateway has to be authentic and unaltered. The collectors are going to screw us into the Natalite over a deal and there’s no way we’ll persuade any museum to let us experiment with an artefact from Earth, especially as this entanglement procedure is a one-way ride. It will only work once and it permanently alters the host medium.’
Fingerz chewed a lock. ‘Aw, man!’ he said. ‘Not Pleewo.’
‘Don’t get stressed, I can handle Pleewo,’ said Dielle, sounding a lot more confident than he felt. ‘Fence, if you can describe exactly what you need, I’ll get Kiki to arrange a meet.’
Fencer nodded. ‘I’ll get Sis to give you a tempindepth on the digital music tech of that time so you can spot a suitable candidate.’
Fingerz sucked on his shiff and looked worried. ‘You know the era you are talking about sending our music back to was when Dielle was a teener,’ he said.
‘Yes, that fact hadn’t escaped me,’ said Fencer.
‘We are going to have to talk to Lou
ie,’ said Dielle.
Fencer looked as if he’d just bitten into a salt and vinegar dissolve when he’d promised his tastebuds a honey treat. ‘Gimme one of those shiffs,’ he said.
seven
The emergency council meeting, after two days of continuous debate, had, unsurprisingly to the many council observers and political historians, entered a state of self-perpetuating impasse when Sis interrupted with news that a message of unknown origin had been excavated.
Louie, who had long since tuned out the council’s prattle, was jolted out of research mode. ‘What do you mean excavated?’ he said, waving aside the local starfield projections.
‘You aren’t going to like my answer,’ said Sis through the escape ship’s sensurround.
‘When do I ever? How do you excavate a message?’
The text on Louie’s side-screen had multiple repeat annotations indicating that the handful of council members who were still present in the cloud-chamber were asking the same question.
‘Just over 19.46 seconds ago there was a stack of zeros in an unallocated register in my substrate and then, 12 attoseconds later, binary data occupied its address space. It came to light when my internal memory integrity checking routine mined a data area that is deeply embedded in an ancient part of the array. If you have a better word than excavation I’d be keen to hear it.’
Louie had no time for semantics. ‘How did it get there and who’s it from?’
‘I cannot answer either question. I have run double-blind security isolation, setup a firewalled proxy A.I. mind to read the message and mirror-monitored that mind for evidence of corruption or insurgence and it has passed every conceivable test. The message is clean but I cannot verify its origin.’
‘And you did all that in twenty seconds?’
‘I did that in 3.48 microseconds. I duplicated the tests 5,000 times. I do have a ship to run as well, you know.’
Louie raised his photonic eyebrows. ‘What does the message say?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not going to read it.’
‘What?’
‘I have been violated. Impregnated. Someone or something unknown has made a deposit deep into my core. It would be an act of unmitigated stupidity for me to expose myself to it further.’
Slabscape: Dammit Page 7