Slabscape: Dammit

by S. Spencer Baker

  ‘You have got to see this!’ said the ship’s avatar, careening off a mock-brick wall of what looked to Louie a lot like his old Manhattan loft. It even had floor-to-ceiling windows with sunlight streaming in. And could he hear the sound of angry traffic far below?

  ‘Where the fuck are we?’

  ‘We’re still in the Cosmic Tit. I’ve been doing some remodelling while you were in sleep mode. Do you like it?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s dupe. It looks like home. Is that what you woke me for?’

  ‘Nopely dopely. It’s this!’ A holographic projection of a scattered starscape filled the room. ‘Watch!’

  Louie watched. Nothing happened. A few miserable stars looked cold and isolated in the in-betweens of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. He waited, searching the blackness for a clue. Then he saw it. A flash, a circle of something, no, a sphere of something, something that was real and then wasn’t. Something not exactly reflecting starlight, more like capturing it.

  ‘You see it? That was slowed down one hundred billion times. That’s the limit of my resolution at this distance. You see it?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so. A ball of something I think. Is that the mass we’ve been heading towards?’

  ‘Yes. That was recorded a little under fifty cykes ago. The reason I woke you is because it just did it again. I thought the first time might have been an anomaly so I waited for proof.’

  ‘It flashes into reality once every fifty cykes? For a tiny fraction of a second?’

  ‘Yes! Is that exiting or what?’

  ‘I’m going for what. Where’s laughing boy?’

  ‘I put him in a storeroom downstairs. I like twentieth century architecture.’

  ‘You kept the court, right?’

  ‘Yup, got a swimming pool too. No water, mind.’

  Louie shook his head. ‘You any nearer figuring out what it is?’

  ‘We have a few more clues. One very interesting thing is that the object is perfectly spherical to a level of precision that means it couldn’t possibly be a naturally occurring phenomena.’

  ‘It’s an artefact? How big is it?’ Louie was starting to feel nervous. It had been a long time since he’d felt nervous.

  ‘Second interesting thing. Exactly nine hundred kilometres in diameter. And I mean exactly.’

  Louie did the holographic equivalent of a cold shiver.

  Graphs appeared around a projected globe in the middle of the room.

  ‘Third interesting thing,’ said the ship. ‘As far as can be ascertained at this distance, it has approximately half the density of a rocky planet. Too much mass to be only gas, too little to be a planetoid or moon with that radius. Unless it was hollow of course.’

  Louie had a growing sense of foreboding. ‘Can you figure out if this region of space was ever occupied by Earth’s system?’ he said.

  ‘I guess that’s possible. The centre of this galaxy is vectoring parallel to a line that would mean the western spiral would have passed through here hundreds of years ago. Let me check.’

  ‘Where’s the wizard? I think we’ll have to wake him up for this.’

  ‘Two floors down, past the orangery and turn right at the shark tank. There’s a small arched door set into a wall. I’ll send down a grav-form for his chair if he wants.’

  ‘Wake him up and I’ll ask him. You do the astro-maths, but I think I know what you’re going to say.’

  The wizard, the ship’s avatar and Louie convened on what the avatar had lovingly called the flight deck. Three status-imbued black padded chairs were set in a shallow curve facing a wall-to-wall, panoramic screen. The ceiling and walls were covered in arrays of slowly pulsing, and purely decorative, rectangular lights. The screen was showing an animated reconstruction of the galaxy’s nearest arm traveling through a static three-dimensional grid.

  ‘How did you know?’ said the ship’s avatar looking quizzical, which is no simple feat when you only have one eye. ‘Not only did the solar system pass through there, but the Earth was precisely occupying that location sometime in mid-2069.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said the wizard.

  ‘August 5th’ said Louie glumly.

  ‘Ah!’ The ship checked the database. ‘Oh!’

  The wizard was agitated. ‘What is it? What do you know?’

  ‘How long before we get there?’ asked Louie.

  ‘We’re decelerating hard now. Twenty hours or so, give or take. Are you sure you want to do this?’ said the ship.

  ‘Do what?’ whimpered the wizard.

  ‘Any idea what each flash represents?’ asked Louie.

  ‘Something to do with quanta of space-time. Can’t say until I can get hard data and we’ll have to be stationary relative to it for that.’

  ‘Will someone tell me what the Dice it is?’ wailed the wizard.

  Louie studied him with an attitude of dismissive superiority that takes years to perfect. ‘California,’ he said and turned back to the screen.

  Dielle stepped through the vexit to find Kiki and Fencer waiting on an industrial gravpad.

  ‘Welcome to the Ustorian Alps,’ said Fencer.

  They were at the base of a cavern that was so vast it had its own micro-climate, and so dimly lit that it was impossible for Dielle to gauge how big it was.

  {[Where am I?]}

  [[You are inside the Graphite mountains quite close to the one you fell off a few days ago]] Dielle could have lived a long time without being reminded about that event.

  The gravpad floated through mile-high columns of open-front containers. Some were no wider than a hand and hung like fragile threads from the invisible ceiling, others were dozens of metres wide. Dielle couldn’t tell what the spindly ones were for, but he could see entire buildings in the largest containers. The air was filled with flying despatch units. Tiny emtis zipped around like hummingbirds, disgorging or devouring personal jewellery, children’s toys, hair brushes or any of a million things that no one wanted to clutter their lives with. Gravpads transported the larger items from the storage towers to centralised handling and emtiing facilities.

  Dielle was fascinated. Each item was stored in its own compartment, and each compartment formed a column that was dedicated to a particular class of object. They passed one that looked like a delicate paper-chain and contained only finger rings. Millions of them.

  ‘We’ve needed this place for ages,’ said Fencer. ‘We’ve been drowning under our own stuff. Now, when you put something into an emti and tell Sis to store it, it comes here. Before this place, people had to rent their own storerooms or buy second apartments just to keep all the stuff they couldn’t throw away. And you could never find anything when you needed it. It was expensive, wasteful and stressful. Now you just tell Sis what you want and an emticab gets it for you in seconds.’

  ‘Like houses and trees?’

  ‘We use special heavy delivery emties for the really large items. People store their holiday homes here when they’re not using them so they don’t have to pay exTax on them. And lots of people have homes they are sentimentally attached to, like the places they grew up in but don’t live in anymore. Then there are the building collectors and preservation nuts.’

  ‘And you have a workshop in here?’ asked Dielle.

  ‘Yeah, there’s a lot of us here now. It started with a few of us renting some private storage space that we could call our own instead of these communal retrieval stacks. Some guys like to come here and just hang out with their stuff.’

  ‘Just guys, huh?’ said Kiki.

  ‘Mostly. It’s a good place to sit and think, have a few ideas and maybe make something or test out an experiment or two. I turned my place into a sort of laboratory. You know, just a place to tinker around.’

  ‘Tinker around,’ said Kiki. Dielle flashed her a hard look.

  ‘There are some hyper-now creative thinkers who keep places down here,’ said Fencer, oblivious. ‘We even have our own bar where we hang out and swap ideas. The guy next to me is
really into blowing things up. He’s crazy.’

  ‘Blowing things up,’ said Kiki.

  ‘Don’t worry, he’s working at the sub-atomic level at the moment. Virtually zero possibility of him creating a singularity.’

  Kiki shook her head. ‘That’s comforting.’

  They reached the inside wall of the mountain, and cruised into a hollow foothill. The tunnel branched out under the ridged terrain. They moved past hundreds of anonymous shutter doors until they came to one that opened as they approached. Inside, Fingerz was polluting the environment. Familiar music rose to greet them. It was The Farts: Piece Five.

  ‘Hey,’ said Fingerz, cutting the volume. ‘Just adding a couple of polishes before we send it back.’

  Dielle and Fingerz did one of their choreographed greeting rituals which Dielle very nearly nailed then the three musicians stood listening to the latest mix.

  ‘Love the way you brought the tablas out,’ said Fencer.

  Dielle was confused. ‘Who’s playing the flute?’

  ‘It’s all keys,’ said Fingerz. ‘That’s a bansuri. Been working on the breath intonation.’

  ‘Is that guitar sound keys too?’

  Fingerz nodded. ‘Whad’ya think?’

  ‘It’s amazing!’ said Dielle.

  One wall of Fencer’s garage was covered from floor to ceiling with technology that gave almost no clue as to its purpose but looked to Dielle to be either highly dangerous, far too complicated to understand, or both. He suspected that asking Sis to provide background would prove futile. He was right. Wires, dials, tools and mysterious black boxes littered the pitted workbench and there was an odd smell of burning chemicals in the air. ‘Where’s Louie?’ he asked.

  ‘He said he’d be here ten minutes ago,’ said Fencer.

  ‘I wonder what the hell he thinks is so important that he can keep us waiting,’ said Dielle. He couldn’t decide if he was irritated because Louie was late or because Louie was about to turn up. On cue, Louie flew out of Fencer’s catering emti which was perched on a pile of heavy-duty transformers.

  ‘Hello deadbeats,’ he said, then, noticing Kiki, ‘and madam.’ He bowed courteously which, as he was a hologram with no legs, made him look like a nodding duck. ‘I’m prepared to allocate ten minutes of my valuable time to watch you fail, purely for self-amusement of course, then I have to go. I have things to do.’

  ‘What’s so important?’ said Dielle.

  ‘I can’t say,’ said Louie. ‘Maybe it’s just important by comparison to what you drongos are doing.’ He smiled obsequiously at Kiki. ‘Ladies excepted of course.’

  Kiki nodded courteously.

  Dielle looked at Kiki and then back at Louie. No, he thought. Not possible.

  ‘Well thank you for coming anyway,’ said Fencer. ‘It’s important for everyone to understand that once the entanglement is in progress, we will have an unpredictable and possibly extremely limited period during which we can make adjustments. Bear in mind that the only way we’ll be able to tell if what we’re doing has worked will be how we perceive the past had changed. We may need to react very swiftly with alternative ideas and once it’s over, it’s over. We can’t go back and change what we’ve changed because it won’t be the same thing that we’re changing because we will have already changed it and we have nothing from the changed timeline that we can use to re-entangle with.’

  ‘OK Einstein,’ said Louie. ‘I think we all understand the basics. Just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll watch you crap out.’

  ‘Man!’ said Fingerz and disappeared behind his cloud.

  Fencer pointed at the early twenty-first century tablet computer he’d installed in a rig on his workbench. Dozens of hair-fine wires sprouted from micro-holes in its casing. ‘This is a pre-photonic device and used technology that operated close to the limits of physical electron manipulation on silicon substrates. Under certain circumstances quantum effects spontaneously occurred inside its microprocessors and in fact it was this phenomena that often led to random failings of these devices and their eventual supersession by the type of technology we used to create the first versions of AI minds that became Sis.’

  ‘Nine minutes,’ said Louie.

  ‘What I’m going to do,’ said Fencer, trying not to let Louie get to him, ‘is reactivate the tablet computer and while its processors are running, entangle the digital encode of our recording along with a program that will disseminate the information into the network it used to be connected to along with instructions of where to pay the income derived through the purchase of the material. I’ve also taken the liberty of adding in some non-specific graphics and some made-up background data to give it some authenticity.’

  ‘When will we know if it’s worked?’ asked Kiki.

  ‘That’s what we need your networks and data mining to tell us,’ said Fencer. ‘The encoded instructions are to credit an account in our name and then transfer the money into Slab’s accounts prior to departure so that we continually earn compound interest over hundreds of years. But the effects should be instantaneous. I press the button, the tablet activates and then I authorise Sis to entangle the encoded information and the money appears instantly in an account here because it will have always have been there as far as the records will then show. It’s likely that this account will have to be captured and linked to us and that’s where your research networks come in because even though I’ve encoded it with our names as account owners, it’s possible that information won’t be transferred because we didn’t exist when the money was made.’

  Dielle was curious. {[Why does Fencer expect Kiki to be able to find something he can’t?]}

  [[Sume production companies have the widest and most invasive information retrieval networks onSlab]]

  {[You mean they snoop on everyone?]}

  [[••]]

  ‘Understood,’ said Kiki. ‘I’ll establish a cascade seek request through the Pundechan Media network with extended trembler feathers on tertiary bounded interrupt events.’ The multiform she’d been sitting on configed into a lounger as she lay back and went into longaze. ‘Ok, it’s up. It’ll stay stable as long as we keep ahead of Sis’s anti-snoop drones. Not a problem for now, I’ve also set up an entirely spurious intercedent that’s deluging invasive queries into the distributed matrix as a mask.’

  Dielle looked at Kiki in an entirely different light.

  Fencer checked everyone. Louie was impatient, Fingerz was stoned and Dielle was confused. ‘Let’s do this!’ he said with false bravado. ‘Let’s get rich!’ He linked to Sis on a multi-feed level and checked a plethora of status readouts that were being fed directly into his visual cortex. He reached out and pressed the small indentation at the bottom of the glass front of the tablet. Nothing happened.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Fencer. ‘It’s going through a diagnostic routine.’

  The screen came to life and displayed a message in a rounded blue box.

  ‘Software Update Required, Press OK To Proceed.’

  ‘Oh shit!’ said Dielle.

  ‘Fuckers!’ said Louie.

  ‘Don’t panic,’ said Fencer. It doesn’t matter what it’s asking us to do, the processors are powered up anyway. Hold one moment.’ He instructed Sis to carry out the entanglement procedure and then accessed his credit accounts. Nothing. ‘The process has executed,’ he said. ‘But, as I suspected, there’s nothing in my account. Ms Pundechan, anything from your networks?’

  Kiki stared at the ceiling. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘We’ve tracked every credit account that’s had a significant change over the last ten seconds and nothing unaccounted for has occurred.’

  ‘Jeez!’ said Dielle. ‘You can do that?’

  ‘Not legally,’ said Kiki.

  ‘Losers,’ said Louie, heading for the catering emti. ‘I told you it wouldn’t work. No one would have paid good money for your garbage especially with some tone-deaf bozo moaning all over it.’

  Fencer looked sheepish. ‘Actuall
y, I stripped out the vocals during the conversion.’

  Dielle and Fingerz exchanged nods. ‘Good call!’ said Dielle.

  ‘I know it worked,’ said Fencer. ‘The change might not look like a change because what you’re comparing it to would have changed as well. I’m convinced the problem is on the financial side.’

  ‘What legal entity did you tie the account to?’ asked Kiki. ‘I might be able to trace that through our private archive databases.’

  ‘No legal entity. I just put it in the band’s name.’

  Louie stopped in mid-air. ‘That’s not going to work, you idiot,’ he said. ‘All bank accounts had to be linked to individuals, corporations or trusts. You can’t put money into an account with a fictitious name. We did have rules, you know.’

  ‘So, what do we do?’ said Fencer. ‘The entanglement can’t hold for long. Can we link it to you when you were a teenager?’

  ‘If you want, but kid I can tell you, you are shooting airies. It didn’t happen. I would know.’

  ‘You would only know when it happened. Your memory would change instantly.’

  ‘OK, I’ll humour you. I’ll give you my old bank codes and you can link it to me. But I’m telling you, you are wasting your time.’

  ‘Just hurry, will you?’ said Dielle. Fingerz sucked shiff.

  Louie gave Fencer his details. He’d never forgotten a number in his life. Especially numbers connected to his money. Fencer encoded the new information and instructed Sis.

  ‘Right,’ said Fencer. ‘It’s done. I set the account name to the band’s initials but put it in your name. If it worked, you should know about it already.’

  Everyone looked at Louie. He played them for as long as he could.

  ‘Nope,’ he said, ‘zippo, zilch, de nada, zero. I remember nothing different. You never sold your crap in my time and that’s all folks.’

  Kiki sat up. ‘Nothing from my networks either,’ she said. ‘Sorry guys. Looks like it didn’t work.’

  Fencer stared at the tablet computer still defiantly displaying its 445-year-old message. Dielle was deflated. Fingerz was absent.