Slabscape: Dammit

by S. Spencer Baker

  She was right. His favourite comfortable shoes had been ruined by the trek through the rusting wilderness. ‘I can buy anything I want,’ he said. ‘I have plenty of money.’

  ‘Do you now?’ She held out her hand. ‘Give some to me then and I’ll go and buy you a fancy pair of Baileyboots.’

  Dielle looked at her outstretched palm and realised two things: first, he was stone-cold broke and second, she really did look more beautiful when she was angry.

  The bell that had woken him up a half-dozen times during the night tolled again.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, grabbing his hand. ‘The Matriarch doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’

  She moved so fast he had to run to keep up. He had a strong premonition that it would always be this way.

  The meeting chamber was occupied by a ragged group of twenty or so men and women who were all talking at each other without providing the space for any replies. The words were unintelligible to Dielle but it was clear by the tone of the voices and the temperature in the room that there was a serious disagreement going on. The Matriarch stood up from the centre of the melée and waved to Dielle to follow her into her private rooms.

  There was no tea on offer this time. ‘What do you know about alien messages?’ she demanded after she’d closed the door to her inner sanctum.

  ‘What messages?’ said Dielle.

  ‘They’re feeding the mindless cretins up there some garbage about signs and messages being an elaborate hoax from your so-called enemy but we all know that’s blocks right?’

  ‘I seriously have no idea what you are talking about.’

  The Matriarch studied him coolly. ‘How did the reading go yesterday?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘What did they want you to read to them?’

  Dielle studied the Matriarch coolly. ‘How long are you going to keep me here?’

  ‘I’ve already told you, you are not a prisoner, you are free to leave whenever you want. You just can’t take a body tech maintenance backpack with you, or rather you could, but it wouldn’t work for you.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘You look fit enough, you might be able to walk for a couple of days, maybe three, assuming you don’t do something stupid. Then your internal organs would start closing down and your mind would fog and soon after that you would go into toxic shock and your heart would stop.’

  ‘And how long would it take me to get back to civilisation.’

  ‘You call that civilisation?’

  Dielle glared at her.

  ‘If you knew which way to go to the nearest functioning up ramp,’ she continued, ‘and you had adequate provisions, maybe you could get there in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘How long is that?’

  The Matriarch shook her head. ‘Let’s put it this way, by the time you got there you would have been dead for about five days.’

  ‘And you say I’m not a prisoner?’

  ‘We aren’t barbarians you know. We simply choose to live a different kind of life to the one you’ve been forced into. You might find you like it here.’

  Dielle couldn’t remember being forced into anything, although he did have a vague feeling of unease about how little say he had over what happened to him.

  ‘And what if I refuse to read to the kids?’

  Dielle was pretty sure he knew the answer to that question, but he felt he had to at least attempt to stand up for himself.

  ‘Don’t tempt me,’ she said. ‘What’s the problem? Is this book something bad?’

  Dielle wondered why she was so keen to find out about the catalogue and why the Naturalists wanted to keep it a secret.

  ‘I need some credits before I do anything more. I need some clothes that fit me and some shoes.’

  She walked over to a bureau, took out a stack of printed bills and handed them to him. ‘Here’s an advance on your wages. Teachers get paid the same as everyone else here.’

  ‘What’s this?’ said Dielle.

  ‘It’s called money. You exchange it for things you want.’

  ‘But it’s just paper,’ said Dielle.

  ‘There’s a café behind this building that trades those pieces of paper for good coffee and fresh baked pastries. I suggest you give it a try. If I need you, I’ll send for you.’ She pointed at a side door and waited for him to leave.

  The Matriarch was right, the coffee was good, the pastries were delicious and only cost a few slips of paper. He sat at a small, round table in the street outside the café, enjoying the warmth of the cloudlight, mulling over his situation and watching people pass by. He could think of worse ways of being held captive.

  It was clear to him that there was something fundamentally different about the way time passed in Up Haven. The type of lifestyle he’d become accustomed to as a part of the onGrid, tenCent SlabCitizenry was infused with constant movement, multiple information streams and instant access to almost anything anyone wanted. Even the leisure activities ran at a break-neck pace. There were no gaps, no space to do nothing and no danger of ever being bored. Here, it was all about gaps and what happened in the spaces in-between the gaps. The woman who had served him wouldn’t even break off her seemingly pointless conversation with another customer to find out what he wanted. He could have drunk a cup of coffee while he was waiting for her to make one and no one seemed to care.

  He was examining his battered footwear and wondering if he had enough paper to buy something more sturdy when she found him.

  ‘You’re invited to a gyre tonight at me cousin’s’ she said.

  Dielle’s face was a question mark.

  ‘Cousins are more family and a gyre is a get-together where everyone sings and dances and tells stories and such. You said you were in a band?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dielle. ‘Keys.’ He mimed playing.

  ‘They have a piano for sure. Can you sing?’

  ‘I’m told that depends on your definition of singing. I think I’ll probably stick to playing.’

  ‘Then I’ll meet you after school and we can have something to eat before the gyre. Will that suit you?’

  She sat down at his table and studied him. Dielle drank her in. From his point of view everything about her was fascinating: the way she moved, the words she used and how she said them, the light in her eyes, the colour of her hair, the way it curled into ringlets that fell to her small breasts, the funny brown marks on her face and the energy she exuded. He could have closed his eyes and still been able to feel her presence, even if she was still and silent, which she almost never was. He knew she was far from perfect. He’d already met perfect and it had left him awed and intimidated. Perfect was freaky. She was better than perfect. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That would suit me just fine.’

  She smiled and his heart leapt.

  ‘Hope,’ she said.

  ‘I am hoping.’

  ‘No, Hope, you eejit, it’s me name. Now you’ve got it you have to treat it with care.’ She reached over, stole the last of his croissant and popped it in her mouth.

  ‘Hope?’ he said. ‘How do you spell it?’

  ‘Sure I don’t know. What would I need to spell it for?’

  ‘Hope,’ he said. ‘It’s a very pretty name.’ He couldn’t stop himself from grinning.

  She stood up. ‘After school, then,’ she said. ‘Better make sure you’re there for two after bells or yer man will be sore.’

  He didn’t get a chance to ask her what two after bells meant before she’d skipped away.

  Bells turned out to be obvious. He’d just bought himself a fine pair of hand-made boots from a leather-worker’s shop in a row of leather-worker’s shops when a peal of bells in a repeating, seemingly random pattern reverberated around the whitewashed walls, followed by the sound of doors being shut and shutters being rattled down.

  Up Haven had gone to lunch.

  He’d already filled up on pastries so he decided to catch up on some missing sleep on a shaded bench and still managed t
o get to the schoolhouse when the hour-bell struck for the second time after lunch. The man was waiting for him outside the door. He acknowledged Dielle with a grudging nod and let him in. His task was as simple as the day before except when a child raised his hand, Dielle knew what it meant.

  Hope was waiting for him when the man decided the kids had heard enough for the day. She took him to a canteen with long benches and no menus. The food and drink was served by a waiting staff who took delight in degrading and abusing their customers. They carried more bowls of stew and flagons of ale than could be reasonably accounted for, regularly broke into song and never dropped a plate or missed when someone wanted more. Dielle sat facing Hope and between two large, bearded men who carried on a heated conversation over his head in a broad dialect he couldn’t understand.

  She knew everyone. She laughed and joked and deftly batted off advances and several lewd suggestions with a turn of her sharp nose and a flash of eyes. She let Dielle use his paper money to pay for them both, but only after haggling down the price. Dielle was surprised that the meal for two, with several jars of very good ale, cost less than the coffee and pastries he’d had earlier. Must be some sort of variable pricing, he thought, remembering what he’d had to pay for his now-redundant stim-unit.

  The gyre was in full swing when they arrived, hand in hand. Ale flowed and incessant banter filled every space, even when someone stood up to sing or play a tune. Dielle felt happily drunk.

  He’d progressed to feeling drunkenly happy when the call went up for ‘the blow-in’ to perform. This was his moment. He felt confident. She would be impressed and he’d be a winner. He sat by the piano and the room went quiet. He flexed his hands and placed them over the keys, relaxed and let go.

  Nothing happened.

  Muttering and coughing closed in from the corners. Dielle looked at his hands and tried to will them to play. He tentatively pressed a few keys at random. The coughing turned to sniggers. He looked around desperately seeking Hope. She was standing beside Fayder who shook his head, said ‘I told you, he’s a feckin’ puppet,’ and left.

  ‘It seems,’ said Dielle, red faced and wretched, ‘that the drink has gone to my fingers. I’ll tell you a story instead.’

  He told them a story of waking up in a pure white room after falling through a million miles of soundless clouds. He told them about a magical device that made men dance and do back-flips without them knowing they wanted to. He told them about a balloon-nurse on a string, bobbing around a room with osmotic walls. And he told them about being alone in a place that was billions of miles from his home, a home he couldn’t remember but somehow longed for, launched into a place where millions of strangers watched his every move, where he could feel isolated and vulnerable even when everyone was being kind to him or offering him things he didn’t understand. He didn’t tell them about Louie though.

  His audience was subdued, touched by his candour, finding a place of longing within themselves that was futile to voice. He thought about Louie and what Louie knew and had that he could never know or have. He wondered what Louie would have done in this situation and instinctively did the exact opposite.

  He cried.

  He didn’t sob or bawl, there was no drama or catharsis, he simply discovered salt water was leaking from his eyes. He wasn’t even sure why he was crying, he just knew that he needed to. He’d only been around for a handful of days and although nothing really terrible had happened to him, and most of what had happened to him had either been a lot of fun or pretty amazing, he knew he had been deeply traumatised by the experience. It is, when all is said and done, something of a shock to be re-born as a fully grown adult with a blank memory into a strange new world, no matter how well organised it is. And now, he thought, I can’t even play the dicing piano anymore. He wiped his cheeks and faced the crowd. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Hope was smiling tears.

  Well, he thought, I may have hit the right note after all.

  The Tit came to a full stop. It was almost impossible for two of its occupants to comprehend just how full that stop was. Outside, precisely 500 kilometres away, was the centre of a spherical mass that had once been a part of Earth. The same Earth that Louie had been born, raised and frozen on. The Earth that had, hundreds of years before, momentarily occupied the volume of space before them, but as soon as it had arrived, it, the Galaxy and the rest of the Universe had continued on their way. Earth continued orbiting the sun, Sol continued spinning around the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, and the galaxy continued getting ever more further flung as the Universe expanded as fast as it possibly could. Whether the Universe was also moving relative to other, impossible-to-perceive, universes was still an open question but it was a safe bet that it would be because nothing in the entirety of creation was stationary. Nothing, that is, apart from a 900-kilometre-wide ball of mud, rock, sea and atmosphere that had mostly been known as California. It was stationary in a way that nothing else in the universe was stationary, with the exception of the newly arrived Cosmic Tit.

  There was nothing to see, of course. There would be nothing to see for at least another 48 cykes of subjective ship’s time; just over 15 Earth years.

  At the exact centre of the invisible mass, buried deep inside the rocky promontory of Point Dume, Malibu, were the highly secret experimental labs of the Institute for Research into the Already Known. At the time of the California Disappearance, Louie had been the CEO, President and Chairman of IRAK which was the largest and wealthiest privately owned corporation in the world. When the first rumours of the event hit the screens of his Manhattan offices his first call had been to his P.R. company. ‘Deny everything,’ he told them. He had been denying everything ever since.

  Despite the circumstantial connection between the California Disappearance and IRAK’s labs, and a certain, heavily suppressed, live video stream of an experiment that coincided with the event, no one knew for sure what had happened so no one could prove that IRAK was responsible for the catastrophe or the lives of the 55 million people who had disappeared along with much of America’s most valuable real estate.

  But at least, as Louie was fond of repeating, Arizona and Nevada got shiny new coastlines and the Arizonans finally figured out what to do with all that sand. To them, California had simply disappeared one sunny summer afternoon but, as the insurance companies would be hugely relieved to hear, it hadn’t disappeared at all; it had simply been transferred into a different asynchronicity and effectively come to a dead stop. Even when California did appear again it would only do so for an amount of time so infinitesimally small that it was impossible for any of the inhabitants to file a compensation claim.

  The suppressed, and officially denied, video stream showed that an anonymous individual in an unidentifiable underground lab had decided to see what would happen if he built a human-sized emti transmitter and attach it to a similar sized emti receiver, then direct the transmitter to the receiver and press ‘go’. The culprit was known only by his online identity of ‘Snood’ and while no one left behind had any idea who he was, they could assume two things about him: first that he was bright enough to build it while covering all his tracks and second that he was stupid enough to build it and turn it on.

  Although IRAK had been founded on the matter transmitter and made most of its astronomical profits through the manufacture, sale and distribution of emties, few company employees had the slightest clue how matter transmission worked because it had been invented, or more accurately discovered, through a combination of deduction, observation, trial, error and pure luck. The exact ratio of those factors has never been quantified, but most informed commentators put a 99% weighting on the latter. However, there is a truth that is probably eternal (even though eternity is a provable falsity) that the only thing that is needed for scientists to figure out how something is done is to demonstrate that it can be. Impossibilities are easy to accept; possibilities require evidence and the evidence was in the socks. Milus Blondel had
attempted to quantify laundry-related sock disappearance while he was over-medicated, sexually frustrated and clinging to his place at Prague University and, after having proved beyond any doubt that matter transmission wasn’t only possible but commonplace, had hooked up with Louie Drago who had managed to successfully exploit the discovery to the point of mega-global domination.

  Emties were born of ignorance and confusion and their technology was surrounded by obfuscation and denial, but regardless of their heritage they undeniably worked. They transported matter from one place to another instantaneously but the problem was that they only transmitted matter and not non-matter.

  This was a big problem. Human beings could not be emtied anywhere because they would be stripped of their souls and that was specifically banned by all legal, paralegal, religious and pareligious organisation on Earth. Strict controls were put in place. Soul-sensing cut-off technology was a mandatory requirement before any emti was allowed to leave the manufacturing plants.

  Humanity had been denied the ability to beam up, down or sideways. The frustration was maddening and had driven Snood to find a way of circumventing the soul-sensors, build the first man-sized prototype of an instantaneous emti-to-emti transporter and claim ‘the dawn of real space travel’. Whatever else Snood thought he was doing, one thing is unquestionable: when he flicked a switch he became virtually immortal. In terms of ‘real space travel’ he was unwittingly correct because real space did indeed keep travelling. California, however, didn’t go anywhere and neither did he.

  Louie stared at the image that was being projected outside the ship. It was a visualisation of how California would appear to them. A 900-kilometre-wide spherical section of Earth with a familiar shoreline. ‘So time is stopped in there,’ he said.

  ‘Not exactly stopped but very, very near. The mass manifests in our space-time once every 48.125 cycles and when it does it stays for one quanta of Planck Time which is so short that you can’t measure any time shorter.’

  ‘So is it possible that the inhabitants are still alive?’