Slabscape: Dammit

by S. Spencer Baker

  Dielle was confused. {[Go where?]}

  [[Die, cease to be, clog-pop, croak, kick the…]]

  {[Stop]}

  Kiki looked horrified. ‘But you can’t!’ She said. ‘You’re a SlabWide treasure. We can’t lose you!’

  ‘I’m sorry my dear, but my mind’s made up. I’m either going to find out if this soul really does have a home to go to or I’m going to wipe all of my memories, bring this old brain back to its youth and see in the third millennium as a young man. Who knows? I might be a sportsman or join the fleet! Wouldn’t that be a fine thing?’

  ‘You want to know what it feels like to be a reset,’ said Dielle.

  ‘Precisely, dear boy. You are the longest ever cryo-reset in our history and if I’m going to go back to my prime then I’ll be in zerosleep for almost as long as you were. I want you to tell me all about it.’

  ‘It’s OK, I guess,’ said Dielle.

  ‘You know dear boy. While I value brevity, and surely no one appreciates it more than I.’ Kiki made round eyes at Dielle. ‘If I am going to give up a lifetime of memories, all of my friends and everything that I am, I’m going to need a little more than it’s OK.’

  The next course arrived in a flurry of waiters and wine. Each successive dish excelled the one before. As the meal progressed, Sefton quizzed Dielle on every aspect of his experience of being reset. Under the writer’s precise dissection of the events and the emotions that accompanied them, he remembered things he didn’t even know he’d endured. By the time the deserts and coffees arrived, Dielle felt simultaneously full and empty.

  Kiki was still having trouble accepting Sefton’s intentions.

  ‘But Sefton, this is such an irreversible step, are you really sure?’ she asked.

  ‘Absolutely, my dear. As certain as time is distance, Sefton Parque will be nothing more than magnificent history before the cyke is out.’

  ‘But why?’ said Kiki. She was trembling.

  ‘You’ll find out one day, my dear. Life… really can be just too much to bear.’

  She couldn’t really understand what he was talking about, but then he never expected her to.

  She brightened coyly. ‘You mentioned that there was something in this for us?’

  ‘Well done you!’ he beamed. ‘Yes. Whichever way I decide, I would like Pundechan Media to handle the sumecasts. Whether it’s my cryo-suspension or go-ahead ceremony, I’ll be wanting a suitably flamboyant send-off either way. What say you?’

  Kiki weighed up the angles. She was startled to realise that she was hoping her childhood literary hero would decide to top himself.

  ‘Well, I think you should reset,’ said Dielle. Kiki shot him a cautionary glance that he completely misread. ‘After all, when you’ve been re-fammed you’ll have all of your own books to read so you can sort of re-load your memories. And you could record your current personality as a hologram like Louie did and tell yourself anything you might have missed.’

  ‘Oh how absolutely dreadful! I couldn’t bear to be accompanied by my older self. I don’t know how you tolerate it.’

  ‘Well, we don’t exactly see a lot of each other.’

  ‘No, I’d be insufferable. There could be nothing worse for young-me than being followed around by a pompous old windbag like old-me. I’d always assume I knew better.’ He shook his head. ‘No, if I reset it will be a clean break. I will not even let myself know who I used to be.’

  Dielle shrugged. There had been a few times already when he’d wished Louie had come to the same conclusion. ‘Well, either way, it’s got to be better than going ahead surely? I mean, if you can live forever why would anyone choose to die?’

  ‘While there are some very good answers to that question,’ said Sefton, ‘the cold truth is you are not going to agree with them and you won’t even understand them until you are at least six or seven hundred cykes old.’

  Kiki knew that it was common for SlabCitizens to decide to go ahead in their 700s, and she had heard the rationalisations before but still didn’t get it. She tuned out the conversation and started working up some funeral scenarios.

  ‘You know where we are going?’ asked Sefton, directing his conversation solely at Dielle as the waiters poured the nearoak-aged Rat5 Calvados.

  ‘Home, yes,’ said Dielle.

  ‘And you know why?’

  ‘To complain?’

  ‘Ha! Yes, that old chestnut. Well, I suppose we might do a bit of finger wagging, if we ever get there, but really, there’s nothing to be gained by it. No, dear boy, the reason we’re going home is because we yearn for it. We remember what it was like to be united as one consciousness and that memory is in every cell of our being. It’s in our hearts and our mitochondria and it goes back to the dawn of humanity.’

  Dielle tried to catch Kiki’s eye to check if she was buying any of this but she was lost in longaze.

  He continued, oblivious to his audience’s apathy. ‘And the question that starts to eat at you like a cancer, is: If I continue to stay in this body, with this consciousness or soul or whatever you like to call it, am I preventing it from continuing on its own journey? Have I trapped it here in the physical realm and thereby stunted its growth? Am I holding it hostage to my own base desires? Letting fear, self-indulgence and petty fripperies interfere with the magnificence and beauty of the most sacred of pilgrimages.’

  Dielle started playing with the cutlery. At least the apple brandy was helping to take the edge off the weirdness.

  {[Is there a polite way I can get him to shut up?]}

  [[No one has found one so far]]

  There was another advantage to being blind that Sefton hadn’t mentioned: you couldn’t see when excessive yawning was reducing your audience to tears.

  ‘And you see, this raises more questions than answers, and the answers can only be discovered by stepping into the unknown. I feel this wrench like a tidal force at the very core of my being.’ He slammed his fist into his chest for emphasis. ‘Something in me, some part as yet unseen but, oh yes, increasingly heard, demands to be set free!

  ‘But if I reset, that voice will be silenced for centuries. I know that I, as a young man, just like you do now, will believe these ideas to be nothing but the incoherent ramblings of a crazy old coot, eh?’

  {[Help! I need something to say]}

  [[Ask Milli]]

  {[Who?]}

  [[Milli, the Orgasm Cat]]

  {[~?]}

  [[The Millennium Organic Random Generator of Aphorisms, Sayings, Maxims, Clichés And Truisms. Established by Adjunct Mhinge the East Valley Hobson at the turn of the cycle millennium as an arbitrary advice service. Some people swear by it - or at it]]

  {[How do I use it?]}

  [[Preface a question with Milli:]]

  {[Milli: Do our souls demand to go home?]}

  He got an instantaneous response. ‘If you think fate is fickle, try tempting it,’ he said.

  Sefton grabbed Dielle’s hand and squeezed it hard. ‘Precisely dear boy! Precisely!’ he said.

  Kiki came out of longaze. ‘Sefton darling, if you do decide to go ahead would you consider writing a book about the lead up?’

  ‘Now, you know better than to discuss business with me. My rapacious agent will contact you in due course.’ He stood up. ‘Well, this has been absolutely splendid. Dielle, dear boy, you have been most helpful. Kiki darling, your vivacity is palpably delicious and if I was a younger man, by Dice I’d be challenging young Dielle here for your favours!’ He kissed her the way a grandfather kisses a niece.

  ‘Well, you may well be a younger man Sefton, perhaps I’ll have to time my reset to coincide with yours.’

  ‘By golly, that’s an offer that’s hard to resist!’ said Sefton. Kiki wondered if she’d just made a tactical error. ‘I’ll let you know my decision presently, but for now I must go. There’s so much I still need to complete and so little time.’

  Dielle and Kiki watched him leave, holding their tongues until Sis assured them he wa
s out of earshot.

  ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,’ said Dielle.

  ‘Yes dear,’ said Kiki. ‘When you use Milli, tell Sis it’s a private query.’

  twelve

  Louie was talking to an Erik outside the Plywood Café in Spinstanbul when the first screens showed up. The café was now even more at the centre of things than it had been before Spin's reconfiguration.

  Skin the Earth. Take a moon-sized lump hammer and pound the skin flat until there are no discernible geographic features. Join all the land masses together into a vast, rectangular Pangea and drain off the surrounding ocean. Notice that although there are no longer any lines to demarcate nations, religions or races, the conurbations run like shit-stains across the bleak terrain. Preserve only those cities with distinctive architectural styles, cultures, cuisines, languages and ethnicities and use a giant box-cutter to slash away at the rest until it’s a ragged tissue, then pull it apart, lengthwise, like a paper christmas decoration. Roll it into a 350 kilometre-long hollow tube and set it slowly rotating around a central axis. Then wait a couple of hundred years while the inhabitants redistribute themselves and their homes along the axis, following trends and whims to build living, adaptive neighbourhoods. That was The Spin before the course change meant that everything had to be consolidated at the wall ends of the axis and braced against the impending acceleration.

  Spinstanbul had been compressed into a ball of alleyways, arcades and bazaars and was now less than a stone’s throw in zero G from Spinsterdam to the spinward, with Vrille de France to the anti-spinward and up. There was a busy NY3 bar directly underneath them and a lookadat club that, despite having an entrance in CubaLibra, managed to eject its exhausted clients into Kucuk Square, which the Plywood Café now overlooked. It was chaotic, confusing and a lot of fun. The Spinsters were talking about keeping everything this way after the course correction was completed and were already debating about what to do with the three hundred kilometres of denuded triple helix.

  Ostensibly, Erik had come to talk about Louie’s plans for a basketball league but there had been only one topic of conversation so far: what it would take to force the interns to make a sensible decision. By sensible they meant drastic. It was clear that both Louie and the NAHs were on the same side. The only difference was the level of stupidity they assigned to the members of the human contiguation who were, even as they spoke, endlessly debating the moral foundations of territorial space law. A space law that was, as far as Louie and Erik, and undoubtedly the aliens, were concerned, completely irrelevant.

  Louie pointed at the two-story-high red rectangle that had appeared without warning and dominated the square. It displayed a pattern of concentric circles surrounding a large, white disc and looked like a giant target. ‘The fuck is that?’ said Louie.

  Erik checked the NAH network. ‘They're appearing all over Slab,’ he said. ‘I’m getting multiple feeds of identical instances in major thoroughfares and high-traffic locations throughout the day sections. They appear to be repeaters of the sign we’re heading towards. The original changed to display this same pattern a few seconds before these local ones showed up.’

  A couple who had just tumbled into the square from the nightclub exit ramp looked up, pointed and laughed.

  ‘Look at those two,’ said Louie. ‘What does it take to engage these people?’

  ‘Direct and immediate pain or a restriction of their right to party,’ said Erik.

  ‘What does Sis make of this?’

  ‘Same as before. Origin unknown. No speculation. She’s deployed military personnel to try to capture a sign but as far as can be ascertained they are photonic.’

  More people crossed the square. They ignored the sign.

  ‘Sis has already had over a million queries from the biomass. The vast majority of people are assuming it’s a teaser campaign by some stealth-mode SoftAd marketing agency and want to know what they're advertising. GBH have started a book on it. The 2 to 1 favourite is it's a trailer for a new game, 7 to 2 for a new clothing brand.’

  ‘What odds would I get for alien incursion?’

  ‘500 to 1 apparently. No, wait, someone's just placed a sizeable bet on that option so the odds have dropped. I wonder who that was?’

  ‘Don't look at me, I only bet on certainties.’ Louie studied the diagram. The rings were slightly ovoid and each one had a small, white dot somewhere on it. Some of the dots were bigger than others, and they all had either one or several rings around them with even smaller dots on them. ‘You know what this reminds me of?’ he said. ‘A star system. Look, there’s the sun in the centre and there’s a handful of planets with moons orbiting them. That crossing ellipse could be a comet.’

  ‘Indeed, you are not the first to note this. Ha! A chain of BodiCon franchises called Heavenly Bodies just registered this image as their new corporate identity. There’s no way they could have instigated these signs, they’re just being opportunistic.’

  ‘Cute,’ said Louie. ‘So why would the aliens send us a map of a star system?’

  ‘Perhaps they’re trying to tell us where they are.’

  ‘Why the Dice would they do that? That’s the dumbest thing they could do – reveal their home planet to an alien race. They have no idea how much of a threat we could be.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘The fuck I did!’

  ‘Not you personally. Probes were launched from Earth in the late twentieth century that would eventually leave the solar system and potentially travel interstellar distances, albeit at a pace that meant humanity would probably have died out before they arrived anywhere interesting, but the point is they had plaques attached to them engraved with maps showing anyone who captured them how to find Earth.’

  ‘You’re jerking my chain!’

  ‘No, it’s true. Ask Sis about the Voyagers. We took the precaution of collecting them during our departure. They’re in the Space Museum in Seacombe DownSide. So if you humans thought it was acceptable to tell everyone where you lived, then it’s conceivable that these aliens would do the same.’

  ‘That would really be something,’ said Louie. ‘Our first ever alien encounter and they turn out to be as dumb-ass stupid as we are.’

  ‘Sis is running matches on every system within a plausible time-light radius. It could take a while.’

  ‘Checkout that fourth dot from the centre,’ said Louie. ‘The dot on the first of its two rings is black. It’s the only black spot on the whole thing.’

  ‘You are correct. It has already been noted. We are looking for a nearby matching system and will seek out the inner moon of the fourth planet.’

  ‘If we find an alien civilisation there I’ll eat my hat.’

  Erik studied Louie carefully.

  ‘I know I don’t have a hat,’ said Louie. ‘It’s an old Earth expression, like show my ass in Macey’s window.’

  ‘You don’t have an ass either.’

  ‘I thought you NAHs had a sense of . . .’

  ‘We’ve found it!’ said Erik.

  A screen displaying an annotated real-time image of the matching star system rose from the café table.

  ‘Only 18 light-hours away,’ said Erik as Sis side-panelled data that Louie didn’t understand. ‘This view is from a pair of probes Sis just relay-emtied over there. We’re masking the return signal path just in case.’ The image centred on a grey-banded gas giant with two moons, then zoomed further to the smooth-faced, blue-veined inner moon. It was barren. There were no visible signs of civilisation or even weathering, just a few jagged surface cracks and a smattering of pockmarks on a dull, white face. Sis provided data about mass and orbital velocity. It was tidally locked, slightly smaller than Earth’s moon, had no atmosphere, no traces of organic compounds or water and no significant heat signature. It reminded Louie of a dead-man’s-eyeball marble he’d prized as a kid. Glassy, opaque and lustreless.

  They watched the lifeless image as Sis ran ev
ery conceivable analysis and several inconceivable ones. There was nothing there.

  ‘Why the fuck would they direct our attention to a dead moon?’ said Louie. ‘This is making no sense!’

  ‘There has to be a reason,’ said Erik. ‘This system exactly matches the diagram on the sign. Sis has widened the search and there isn’t anything even remotely close to this system within a light year of us. This is unquestionably where they want us to look.’

  A spinbug carrying a military detachment arrived above their heads and cautiously approached the repeater sign. It vanished when they got within a hundred metres of it, as they knew it would. They sped off to vanish the next one.

  ‘So what?’ said Louie. ‘We sit here and moongaze?’

  ‘Better ideas on a postcard,’ said Erik.

  ‘Witty,’ he said, trying to see if the patterns of cracks on the moon’s surface could spell out a word. ‘Fascinating though this is, I can think of about a hundred more interesting ways of wasting my time.’

  Louie emtied back to the bridge of his escape ship.

  ‘Who placed that bet about the sign being an alien incursion?’

  ‘Impossible for me to trace,’ said Sis. ‘Grossefuch, Bestialer & Hitler are the most popular bookmakers onSlab mainly because they apply a strict anon-untrace policy to all of their clients.’

  ‘Any possibility the Interns or NAHs are doing a bit of insider trading?’

  ‘Highly unlikely. NAHs have no need of money and Interns aren’t able to connect to the outside grid so couldn’t place a bet even if they wanted to.’

  That was news to Louie. ‘Are you saying Interns can’t talk to anyone who’s not a council member? Don’t you trust them?’

  ‘It’s not a matter of trust, it’s one of guaranteeing integrity. I.D. specifically prohibits any external influence on council. It’s not only to prevent the SlabCitizens from trying to leverage council matters, it’s also to ensure that the council members can get no personal benefit from their position. You may recall that in your day the only reason politicians took office was for personal gain?’