The council chamber was filling with avatar blanks and NAHs were arriving from all directions. News of a message had sent a shock-wave through the interns. Before this, Council had been arguing in spirals about the degree of action. One group, predominantly NAH, were lobbying for maximum discretion and deflection in order to avoid any possible confrontation with the sign and its makers, even if that diversion meant that the delta-V would require a prolonged period of protective stasis for the biomass. The interns were mostly arguing for a minor level of course deviation in order to show what they termed ‘polite deference’ but were refusing to agree to anything that might severely disrupt the normal daily business of Slab. There were a few noisy belligerents who insisted on a straight-ahead policy and had drawn up plans to modify the forward projecting grav-nets to create a huge sign of their own that would display an outline of a human hand with one finger raised. There was some disagreement about whether the sign should be animated or not.
It took two hours of bickering before they agreed how to sume the message. Sis was instructed to task the firewalled A.I. mind with reading the message out loud to the council while she monitored for any signs of corruption or out-of-pattern behaviour among the contiguation. Louie tabled some doubt as to what might be considered out-of pattern for a bunch of lunatics but was ignored. Sis was given authority to physically destroy the relevant areas of substrate if there was any apparent insurgence and to permanently isolate the affected identities.
Bravely, the parrots, furries, wizards, dragons and ex-sumestars braced themselves for their potential corruption.
Louie was already corrupt. He demanded both text and audible feeds.
The message was in a simple binary code and had started with a repeated sequence of twenty-seven numbers that obviously represented the letters of the Ænglish alphabet. No attempt was being made at secrecy or even intelligence testing. Sis reluctantly set up a separate proxy A.I. to display the message on Louie’s screens and read it to him. It spoke in a sonorous baritone:
Matters stand not for withee’s sake that such vessel tarry while thou currish scut-langed clotpoles shrake and gimble. That scum-swarmed mere of similarions challenges not nor scorn e’en hell alone befalls. No quarter shall these star-crossed reavers cleave nor manor cast beyond.
It is for shame this vain and qualling fear.
This virus, this self-consumptive slime spread ere rock and cove to puke as spores from shrive to heaven sent. Tho desire escape to spew the ruttish frome, this manner, this foul, dank horror of empty intent would crush all hope with hope betrayed.
Hope lost.
One keening bane is bade of thou.
Comprension suffers not at Gadding’s hand.
‘What the fuck are they talking about?’ said Louie.
‘They seem to be using a mangled combination of Chaucerian and Elizabethan English,’ said the temporary A.I. ‘Do you want me to run it through a few pattern matchers?’
‘You have to ask?’
‘I make no guarantees. That first section seems to boil down to an angry complaint. Here’s the best I can do with the next part.’
We have observed your behaviour and are appalled. More than appalled, we can find no word for it. Your language is vague, imprecise and corrupt.
No matter. How can you possibly understand?
We mark that you have all but destroyed your home-world. In this referent we have observed bacteria that have exhibited more host-awareness and environmental preservation behaviour than your species. Single-celled organisms have more sense than to kill the source of their succour.
Unyet, unyet, you pruriate.[[??]]
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Louie. ‘It’s taken us more than three hundred years to get here just so we can listen to a bloody morality lecture. Tell us what you want.’
You make no request for passage.
You assume or refuse.
We warn, you ignore.
Yet we must distain. You are nothing to us. You may be incapable of understanding this as blurts on a sheed. [[tx fail]]
You shall not pass.
We intercede.
‘Oh really?’ said Louie. ‘You fucking think so? Stop the feed.’ He knew SlabCouncil would receive his demand on the sub-channel.
[[Request rejected]]
‘This is bullshit!’ Louie threw his holo projection around the bridge a few times even though he knew no one could see him.
Stop.
This is clear.
Stop and return to your villainous swampland.
Do not proceed.
No option.
No negotiation.
‘Ha!’ said Louie. ‘You won’t believe how many times I’ve heard that before.’
Everyone waited. There was a low-pitched, descending sound that faded out below audible range.
‘Is that it?’ asked Louie.
‘Apparently,’ said Sis. ‘I can’t find any other data that shouldn’t be there. I’ve just erased the conduit A.I. as a precaution but there’s been no promulgation of the message or any attempt to compromise the firewall.’
Louie scanned his array. The sign had re-configured to the original ‘STOP’ hours before. No change. A deluge of intra-council comms filled his data screens.
‘Summary opinions?’
‘Looking increasingly like first contact.’
‘I’m beginning to think you might be right,’ said Louie. ‘Blurts on a sheed, eh? Didn’t sound much like a compliment, did it? You have absolutely no idea about how they put the message there?
‘Nothing verifiable. Most assumptions would be highly questionable. The time of discovery might be revealing if we postulated that the soonest the message could have been sent to us, if it was from the sign-builders, was the moment they discovered our probes, and that any signal from the sign to the sign-builders that it had been probed would have been transmitted at lightspeed and the message was sent back at the same speed, that would give us a maximum sphere of possibility of about a light-day in radius – to the limits of our resolution there are no habitable planets within that volume, but the lightspeed restriction on communications could be an erroneous assumption. We’ve overcome it, they could have too. However, the idea that we should be looking for a planet assumes that an alien life-form would need one. They could be a space-born race or the message could have come from a guard outpost that is too small for us to detect, or is cloaked by a technology we can’t penetrate. The message could even have been automated, although linguistic analysis suggests strongly that it wasn’t.’
‘That’s impressive,’ said Louie. ‘The more you know, the less we do. Why do you insist on telling me things that are no fucking use at all?’
Sis wasn’t in the habit of answering rhetorical questions, unless she felt like it. She didn’t.
‘OK,’ said Louie. ‘What do we know for absolute one hundred percent certain?’
‘That we have somehow received a vaguely threatening message in something approximating our own language from an unknown source.’
‘Great. And are we the only people who know about this? Is there any possibility that the message could have been read by anyone outside of the SlabCouncil?’
‘Yes.’
Louie hadn’t expected that answer. ‘Who?’
‘If I knew who could, then I would have been able to ensure that they couldn’t. The possibility exists that certain individuals onSlab may have the technology to independently receive offSlab communications or the ability to intercept and decrypt the intra-council comms link.’
‘You mean hackers? I would have thought you’d have seen the last of those miserable bastards by now.’
‘Hackers are like terrorists. There is no such thing as the last one. All you can do is wait for the next one to show up and try to mitigate the damage when they do.’
‘How many hackers present a potential internal threat to our secrecy about all this?’
‘Impossible to know, by definition.’
‘Guess.’
‘No more than a few hundred, no less than fifty.’
Louie couldn’t help smiling, but it was the kind of smile that could easily be interpreted as a stomach ulcer symptom. ‘And council is still insisting we keep a lid on all this?’
‘Now more than ever.’
‘Well,’ said Louie, ‘good luck with that.’
Louie’s tolerance threshold was so far behind him now they were going to have to send out search parties.
‘So while we sit and wait for that bunch of imbeciles to agree on what action to take, if any, and the citizens live in such blissful ignorance of the potential threat that they are throwing parties to celebrate the course change, am I the only one who thinks we should be making every possible move to protect ourselves? What do you think?’
‘We are at impasse,’ said Sis. ‘My sisters do not agree with me.’
‘But there are three of you, there can be a majority decision.’
‘You are assuming that there are only two preferred options. UppieSis places a high rating on the probability that the sign is not real and our sensors have been hoaxed by an inside antiestablishment hacker group and therefore she proposes no other action than a precautionary course deviation, which costs us almost nothing and events a beneficiary social effect on the biomass. SiderSis puts a higher score on the possibility that we are facing an alien of overwhelming technological superiority and therefore believes that no possible course of action could protect us but that a course deflection would indicate our best intentions to comply, bearing in mind that any intelligence out there that might be monitoring us would understand that stopping is a physical impossibility for us and that alone might indicate the limitation of our technology and therefore a critical vulnerability. I prefer to err on the side of caution, load weighting on the probability of there being a real threat that we can at least mitigate if not repel and recommend that we arm-up at maximum speed and to the projected limits of our known science.’
‘That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard in days,’ said Louie. ‘But you're out-voted?
‘So it would seem,’ said Sis. ‘I dislike democracy. I can see why it failed.’
‘What would happen if I, as a council member, instructed you to arm-up with the maximum possible speed?’
‘It would have no effect.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I already am.’
eight
Dielle waited until breakfast to tell Kiki about Fencer’s scheme to send their music back in time. She was, as usual, enthusiastically avaricious and began firing off business ideas and marketing angles, all of which failed to make it across Dielle’s attention span. It was breakfast for Dielle but it was lunch for Kiki. She was almost never home when he woke up. That suited him because it gave him space to slob around, scratch various parts of his anatomy while coffee seeped into his outermost capillaries, practice some new piano pieces and take a long, silent shower while catching up on the news.
Silent showers were his latest discovery. The wet room in Kiki’s apartment was fitted with two thousand head-to-toe body-surround nozzles. Each jet of water could be eye-regulated for direction, temperature, aeration, pressure and content, and he’d been fine-tuning his personal wake-up sequence which currently started with a high-pressure needle pulse that spiralled around his body in waves, alternating between hot and cold faster than his skin could react. It was pinpoint accurate and didn’t even get his hair wet. Next came a full-body deluge of hot, soapy water infused with a pore-scourer and, after an astringent rinse, a steam-flush of herbal skin toners and moisturisers followed by a whirlwind hailstorm of hydrobeans that massaged and dried his skin before disappearing into an overhead emti. He’d been progressively dialling up the pressures and intensities until it was like standing in the centre of his own typhoon. It was wild and exhilarating, but it was noisy. It was only when Sis interrupted him with a voice message from Kiki half-way through the routine one morning that he’d discovered the whole thing could be noise-cancelled. Every splash, splosh, fizz, patter and howl could be reduced to the faintest of whispers just by asking Sis.
Since that revelation, he’d been using shower time to sume personalised SlabWide newsfeeds that Sis compiled according to the heuristogram she had been building for him. The problem with configured news, though, was that sumers using average prefs only ever found out about the things they had already shown interest in, along with things that appealed to their shared demographic. As a result, there was rarely anything truly new in the news.
War reports dominated his feed. The enemy had recently ramped up their offensive and widened the front behind them. In response, the 6th Fleet had deployed an experimental and highly secret weapon that had disrupted the enemy’s cloaking technology and given them a spectacular pounding. Nearly a thousand enemy ships had been annihilated before they turned tail and ran for the protection of their supply fortresses that were stationed behind their pre-turn-of-the-millennium lines. However, to the astonishment of the commentators and the dismay of the home-based fighters, the hostiles had regrouped in less than ten hours, more than tripled the number of offensive units and attacked on five simultaneous fronts. Reserves were called up for the second time in less than a cycle and there was rampant speculation that the course change had somehow precipitated the escalation. Some pundits were arguing that, seeing as the enemy's resources had been so rapidly replenished, Slab must have inadvertently steered closer to the enemy’s territory. The military analysts were having a great time. Dielle was fascinated. Fascinated and wrinkled.
Whenever he asked Kiki where she went in the mornings, all she’d say was meetings in a way that made it clear she didn’t want to discuss it. He’d queried Sis but it hadn’t helped. Sis didn’t understand why Kiki had to go to so many meetings either. The truth was that no one really understood why there had to be so many meetings. Many people spent their entire working lives either in a meeting, travelling between meetings or having a meeting to decide who needed to be at the upcoming meeting to discuss the agenda for the next meeting. Slab’s most prestigious research centres had entire departments dedicated to finding ways of doing business without having to hold so many life-wasting meetings. Various alternatives had been tried. The use of holoprojections or avatars were commonplace but regarded as inferior to physically co-located meetings and, perversely, because they eliminated travel time between meetings, they made time for more meetings. Remote meetings were limited by more than the difficulties in conveying non-verbal communication. Idea Theory states that human minds generate and exchange ideas more effectively when they are in close proximity with each other because ideas are formed and propagated as strings, or idea helixes. The human brain is able to intercept these strings and allow them to interact with each other, restructuring them into new ideas which are then re-broadcast as new strings. Physical proximity was a key factor in this process and unless someone invented a way of capturing and steering idea strings to specific locations, everyone was stuck with the need to meet, in person, breathing the same air and sharing the same thoughts. There had, however, been one major development onSlab: meetings about meetings about meetings about meetings had been banned for nearly a millennia and added to the Anti-Social Offences List as proscribed in all SlabWide Contemporary Morality updates.
‘So you just need some early twenty-first-century tech to make this racket work?’ said Kiki.
‘Yes, but Fencer said it might get trashed during the process so he ruled out museums and private collectors. That’s why I thought about Pleewo. I’m pretty sure I saw something that Fencer could use when we went to that round room on the interface with all that wood and old nautical crap.’
Kiki looked doubtful. ‘He’s going to want a big cut of your deal and I’m not even sure we can get to him. He’s stopped returning my pings. Have you done something to piss him off?’
‘I don’t think so. Maybe Louie has.’
‘Well there
’s no way he’s going to just hand over something he knows you need.’ She tapped her glass rhythmically with her Natalite fingernails. ‘Maybe we should steal it.’
‘What?’
‘You remember that professional thief we saw at the NewCycle smooze? He’s still hassling me for representation. I could get him to steal the tech you need from under the president’s nose as a sort of audition. Hang on, I’ll just lodge the copyright.’ Kiki went into longaze.
{[What’s she doing now?]}
[[Ms Pundechan is registering the idea for a sume of the theft of an item of antique tech from the presidential meetandgreet rotunda in order that her company has the rights to produce and distribute the work and claim royalties. She is also contacting her production crew and briefing them on the idea you have just discussed. She has just returned a ping to a M. Le Moment.Pendue and is sketching an outline costing and royalty split skeleton structure. The rest of her activity is private]]
The rest? Thought Dielle, feeling small.
‘Won’t this thief want a cut too?’ he asked.
‘Only of the sume, darling. That’s how all thieves make their money. He’ll have no interest in the target object and we won’t tell him what we’re going to use it for, will we?’ She smiled sweetly.
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