Slabscape: Dammit

by S. Spencer Baker

  [[Cockney. It’s accusing you of feigning ignorance]]

  Ethless: ‘No, we really want to know.’

  [[I’m getting visuals. I’ll relay them directly to the projectors, no censorship on my part but as a precaution I’ll add a fractional time delay, restrict the feed to just you three and deny the linked-in council members until I have verified the feed is non-corrupting]]

  It started with the spine-chilling sound of a siren. Blurred, black crosses filled the projections. The crosses resolved into endless squadrons of multi-engined bombers, silhouetted against a grey sky. They emptied their cargo onto cities, turning them to flames with explosions so loud they rocked the bridge of Louie’s escape ship. The intern, the hologram and the NAH had no choice but to sit through it all. For more than an hour they were barraged with sights and sounds that detailed, in excruciating clarity, every obscene act that humans had perpetrated on other humans, their planet and the flora and fauna that flourished upon it. Or had tried to. Newsreel footage from twentieth century wars, in grainy monochrome, were interspersed with still images and even oil paintings depicting scenes of human-wrought horror: piles of ravaged bodies, torture scenes, children eviscerated and burned alive, hostages decapitated on camera, innocents and guilty alike shredded by war machines of overwhelming force. Violence and mayhem filled their senses. Weapons of mass destruction propagated globally like macabre confetti. Pollution turned beauty to slime, fresh air to smog and bright waterways to oil-clogged cesspools. Uncounted millions starved while others squandered resources and drowned in their own obesity. Blood sluiced through gutters, animals were slaughtered by the billion then turned and churned into processed food to be stuffed into gaping mouths and shitted out into oceans of ordure. Nuclear weapons detonated in a pyrotechnic celebration of global insanity.

  The atrocities kept coming: human skin used for lampshades, living creatures locked in cages too small to allow them to move, women disfigured by acid or raped as victims of war, unborn children ripped from broken bodies, razor-wire-lined muddy trenches filled with half-submerged corpses and feeding rats. The carnage seemed endless. The one thing that united the images was that none of them portrayed accidents or natural disasters. Every event was the result of a deliberate human action. Someone, somewhere had made the decisions that resulted in what they were being shown.

  After a while, even Louie held his head in his hands and couldn’t watch.

  It ended with more crosses. White crosses. Planted in neat rows in green fields. Diagonal lines converging at the horizon.

  After a prolonged silence the entity spoke, unaccented and cold: ‘You shall not come.’

  Ethless, despite being only an avatar of the intern she represented had tears streaming down her face. She tried to form words but failed. Erik looked dejected, unable to defend the actions of a species that had given birth to his own kind. He too was speechless.

  Louie didn’t do speechless. He floated up from his screens and started circling the bridge. ‘But you’re making a mistake,’ he said. ‘You’re judging our past, not our future.’

  [[You’re going to have to explain this concept in more detail. It, or they, have a hard time with time]]

  The alien spoke in a thick Russian accent: ‘The Guardians observe, not judge. You refute our observations?’

  ‘No, but what we did is in our past, right?’ said Louie, waving his arms about as though it made a difference. ‘That is, something we have done and survived. So the ones that survived learned not to do it again. It’s called evolution. It’s how we became who we are.’

  Alien: ‘Who you are is demonstrable. You will not proceed.’

  ‘No, you don’t get it,’ said Louie. ‘You’re making a judgment based on behaviours carried out before we became what we will become before we get to where we are going.’

  The entity went silent. Louie looked around the bridge, raising his eyebrows and gesturing in an effort to garner support from the intern and NAH who were watching him with a mixture of alarm and confusion.

  ‘Say what?’ said the alien.

  ‘We are ephemera,’ said Louie. ‘We are physical entities that exist in a time-based universe.’ He looked to Erik for support. He gave reluctant nod but had nothing to contribute.

  ‘We evolve by a process called natural selection that weeds out weaknesses and flaws on a generational basis. It’s a process that is sequential. Our life cycles are based on growth over time. A human entity has to develop to a certain level of maturity before they can procreate. At this point they pass on advantageous aspects to their offspring who become the next generation. Disadvantageous traits, such as the behaviour you have just highlighted, are self-immolating. The organisms that behave in these self-destructive ways die out before they can pass on their behavioural characteristics.’

  Erik started nodding more vigorously, spurring Louie on.

  ‘In this way, we evolve and leave behind damaging and non-sustainable behaviour.’ Louie knew that was bullshit but he was on a roll and wasn’t prepared to self-edit or get into the endless nuances of human stupidity at this stage.

  ‘Go on,’ said the alien in an excellent imitation of an English comedian doing a bad impression of a Nazi interrogator.

  ‘What you may not be aware of is that the behaviour you have judged us on is a result of less than five thousand years of so-called civilisation. But we only had access to that sort of lethal technology for less than one fifth of the time.’ He was making a wild guess and shrugged to his local audience.

  ‘Years?’

  Sis supplied diagrams of planetary motions with equations that translated them to space-time equivalents.

  ‘Vat is your point?’

  Louie ramped up his rotational velocity. ‘You know how long it will take us to get to you, right?’

  ‘Long? As in distance?’

  ‘No, as in generations.’

  ‘Sequential reproductions of ephemeral organisms in ze space-time referent?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nein.’

  ‘It will take more than twenty times longer than it took for all of human civilisation to evolve from zero technology to where we are now; a space-faring race, pushing the barriers of lightspeed.’

  ‘Light? Vat is zis light?’

  ‘Forget about light,’ said Louie. ‘It’s not important. What’s important is that before we ever get to you we will have evolved into a species that, by design and definition will have survived and therefore must have stopped doing all that shit you are damning us for.’

  The alien went silent again.

  Louie knew when to STFU. Apparently, so did Ethless and Erik. Probably for different reasons.

  ‘Zo…’ said the alien after a protracted pause. ‘You vant to be judged on what you vill become, not on vat you are?’

  ‘Exactly!’ said Louie.

  A scratchy and distant recording of a Mozart quartet filled the room. Louie circled around looking at the floor, convinced that there was something he’d forgotten. It wasn’t often that he’d had to argue for the continuance of the human race. He had even briefly considered jumping ship by buddying up with the alien. After all, he thought from the luxurious position of no-longer being one, humans deserve everything they get.

  The alien interrupted his gyrations.

  ‘Submit code. Ve vill decide,’ it said.

  There was a heavy sound of dropped comms.

  ‘Code?’ said Ethless. ‘What code?’

  [[Carrier signal ceased]]

  ‘What code?’ said Erik.

  [[What code?]]

  ‘Hey!’ said Louie. ‘Disadvantageous traits such as the behaviour you have just highlighted are self-immolating! Whaddya think of them apples!’ He leered at Ethless. ‘And you thought I was just some schmuck from the Bronx!’

  ‘But it’s not true,’ said Erik. ‘The human race has never managed to rid itself…’

  ‘Yadda yadda,’ said Louie. ‘Negotiation isn’t about truth, it’s
about momentum and dynamics and maintaining a positive curve. You gotta know when to slope, when to parry, when to feint. It’s like a dance, see? You lead, she follows, you stumble, she laughs in your face and dates your best friend.’ Louie looked crestfallen.

  [[The moons are adjusting their orbits and there are signs of seismic activity within the mother planet. The gravity entity has clearly departed the system]]

  ‘It appears you have won us a reprieve,’ said Ethless.

  ‘Which will be just a stay of execution unless we figure out what the code is,’ said Erik.

  ‘Sounds to me like it’s been watching a lot of cheap movies,’ said Louie. ‘The codes in those were usually either numbers to combination locks or secret passwords. Maybe we have to unlock something.’

  ‘Maybe what it said was in code,’ said Erik. ‘Sis is running an analysis of the speech patterns and trying to match up specific phrases with the films, TV shows and radio broadcasts they may have been taken from. Perhaps there’s a hidden code in the titles or something more subtle.’

  Ethless, stood up, ready to leave. ‘We should spread the net to engage the gamers,’ she said. ‘They’re used to cracking riddles and codes.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to keep a lid on this,’ said Louie.

  ‘It will just look like another level of one of their games to them,’ said Ethless. ‘They don’t give a damn about what we call reality anyway.’ She stepped through the vexit.

  ‘Hey,’ said Louie, ‘don’t mention it.’

  ‘The intern is clearly troubled, sir, please don’t take offence at her lack of civility. We are again indebted to you,’ said Erik with a deferential bow. ‘I sincerely hope we will continue to be so. However, SlabCouncil are convening a full meeting to decide how to respond to the latest development and I feel I have to be there if only to attempt to defuse some of the more bullish members.’ He tipped his hat and followed Ethless through the transvex.

  ‘They don’t need defusing, they need blowing up,’ muttered Louie to the blank wall. He turned back to the screens. ‘What’s going on with the sign?’

  A large red rectangle filled the forward screen. The planetary diagram had been replaced by two huge, white words; ‘SEND CODE’.

  ‘And the internal repeaters?’

  Sis displayed multiple instances of the alien sign in strategic locations around Slab. They all showed the same ‘SEND CODE’ message but vanished when any of the military bugs approached them.

  ‘We’ve got the average sign manifestation time down to under ten seconds,’ said Sis, returning to voice mode. Looks like the same cross-dimensional trick they did with the hypercube.’

  ‘How are the citizens reacting?’

  ‘The majority are still assuming it’s an elaborate joke or a publicity stunt, even though when they query me I tell them the source is unknown. Less than twenty percent seem to be capable of perceiving this as a real threat, and those that do automatically attribute the threat to our imaginary enemy.’

  Louie shook his head. ‘So are the eighty percent stupid or just cynical?’

  ‘Is there a difference? Bear in mind that we have already seeded multiple leaks and counter-leaks to infer that the previous manifestation was war-related. We’re also getting traction on a rumour that Pleewo is behind it.’

  ‘That might work. Who thought that up?’

  ‘Pleewo.’

  ‘My kind of guy. Has there been any indication of anything trying to infiltrate your systems again?’

  ‘Nothing that my over-mind is able to detect but we could be already compromised and not be aware of it. I do not like this.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Louie, ‘it’s called uncertainty. Get used to it.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Sis. ‘Wait… there is a development. There has been a stable manifestation of an out-of-context object in the middle of the round dance round on the +forward upSide of Seacombe. I’m erecting a full security perimeter and privacy field and have commenced the fabrication of armed interrogation probes. Estimated delivery time to site of incursion: 18 minutes.’

  ‘Can we see it?’

  ‘Just a moment.’

  Sis emtied 45 military-grade surveillance units into the round dance round. They snapped into a hemispherical lattice formation big enough to house a basketball court and trained a battery of sensors onto the object in the centre. Louie’s screens changed to different views of the same dark purple cuboid.

  ‘Looks a bit like a shoebox,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll have to wait for the probes before I can do any remote testing. Until then I can’t even tell you what it’s made of. But it definitely wasn’t there two minutes ago and it was not emtied there through any technology onSlab because I would have a record of the energy spike.’

  Louie studied the screens. It didn’t look a bit like a shoebox, it looked exactly like a shoebox. ‘Someone’s going to have to take that lid off,’ he said. ‘Has anyone come up with a clue about this code yet?’

  ‘Speculation and guesswork so far. I forecast that this is likely to remain unchanged for some time. We’ve already engaged twelve of our best rational logicians on the problem in the form of an abstract query but they’re all arguing with each other.’

  ‘Ask a dozen egg-heads for an opinion and that’s what you’ll get, a dozen opinions. What do you think?’

  ‘I’ll tell you the same as I’m telling anyone who asks,’ said Sis.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  Sis emtied a mechanised construction crew to the alien intrusion site. Multi-armed units with open-cage emties at their core hauled extrusions from their bellies then snapped them together to build a framework around the artefact. Within a couple of minutes they had completed a geodesic dome that connected the surveillance units together, then they retreated to start a bigger dome ten meters further out. An army of slug-like bots crawled from industrial emties that Sis had installed in a hundred-metre perimeter. The slugs formed a line abreast and circled the base of the internal dome, leaving a trail of grey goo solidifying behind them.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Louie.

  ‘Field-reinforced Natalite.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘While it makes no sense to think we can protect ourselves against a technology that has already demonstrated it can manifest a physical object inside Slab, it makes even less sense to do nothing. We have no idea what is in that box or what will happen when we open its lid.’ The view panned around. ‘Here come the cavalry.’

  Sixteen heavily armoured multi-track vehicles trundled out of the emties and into the central dome. They formed a circle exactly two metres from the alien object and unfolded into offensive mode. Each unit carried more than a hundred different weapons, from traditional ballistic and shaped nuclear to laser, photon, electro, gravinometric, magnetic, pulsed ion and phaser, along with the results of Sis’s latest experiments in pan-dimensional tunnelling. Every armament, electromagnetic probe, listening device, imager, x-ray detector, thermal camera, sniffer and taster pointed directly at the intruder. It took less than fifteen seconds to enclose the shoe box with more fire-power than had ever been deployed at the same location at the same time in the history of mankind. Sis cautioned Louie that if the box so much as twitched, everything within the blast domes would be instantly vaporised, and hang the consequences. The views on Louie’s screens changed from the floating surveillance cameras to close-ups from the imagers of the inner circle of probes. Data flooded in.

  ‘Anything useful?’

  ‘It is exceptionally box-like,’ said Sis.

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘It is completely inert, has no detectable internal power source and the outer surfaces seem to be made from a kind of cellulose-based material.’

  ‘What, like cardboard? It is a shoebox.’

  ‘If it is, it is not from here. First, it’s about 10,000 cycles old and second, there is no need for shoeboxes onSlab.’

  ‘How much of thi
s is going out to the citizens?’

  ‘I can’t keep this locked down. It’s in a public place and we don’t dare move it so denial is an impossibility. Anyone who queries me is being allowed to see external views. So far, however, I believe we have been able to maintain absolute secrecy over the moon disappearance and the subsequent dialogue with the entity.’

  ‘What’s the reaction among the citizens?’

  ‘Of those who are showing interest, currently 72% think it’s some form of pay-off from what they still assume is a publicity scam linked to the signs. Slightly over 24% now believe it to be linked to the war and are getting nervous. The minorities split into almost 2% who believe it to be a holy sign, 2% who think it is friendly, and less than 1% who suspect it is what it actually might be. But word is spreading throughout the biomass and it is slowly gaining more attention. The curiosity factor is showing early signs of exponential growth.’

  ‘I guess that’s something,’ said Louie. ‘So, as far as taking off that lid is concerned, it’s a matter of when, not if.’

  ‘So it would seem.’

  ‘So if we’re going to do it anyway, we might as well do it now.’

  ‘Council insists we wait until the external Natalite dome is at least capable of withstanding our own armaments. The blast reinforcements to the underside of the platform are 75% complete and I intend to fill the gap between the domes with a momentum absorber matrix similar to the ones we use on the tubes, only about three orders of magnitude more powerful. ’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Two hours, tops.’

  ‘I’m going down there.’

  ‘Inadvisable. If I have to intervene there will be insufficient time to emti you out of there. You will be vaporised.’

  Louie shrugged. ‘I want to see it.’

  ‘You can see it from here.’

  ‘No, you can see it from here. I’m a human being and I see things with more than my eyes.’

  ‘You are a hologram. Not a particularly sophisticated one.’

  ‘You just resent the fact that I have humanity woven into my circuits and can do and think things that you can’t.’