Slabscape: Dammit

by S. Spencer Baker

  Kiki pulled back her headgear to reveal her new, sponsored hairstyle. Flashes of green and ultra-green rippled through her sculptured locks. She jumped into his arms, kissed him passionately and said something one of her writers had just eyed over. It was probably brilliant, thought Dielle, but it didn’t really matter. He couldn’t hear a thing.

  twenty

  Fencer stared at the charred remains of the tablet computer on his workbench. ‘I know it worked,’ he said.

  Louie hovered over the tech-strewn garage floor and tried to look intimidating. He’d only responded to Fencer’s invitation on a whim. A whim laced with a suspicion that Fencer might be even brighter than other people said he was. ‘What are you saying?’

  Fencer felt deeply uncomfortable. He was used to interacting with A.I.s that were of a significantly higher order of intelligence than himself. He felt embarrassed by having to talk to a hologram that he considered to be, at the very most, barely sentient. How could he trust such obsolete tech, especially as it seemed to default to the contrary view?

  ‘Maybe it’s true that no one bought the recording, or perhaps they did and something went wrong with the financial binding mechanism,’ he said. ‘But I know we sent that data back to somewhere around the mid-2010s. It was there the moment we entangled it. All of the feedback confirmed it.’

  Louie was getting edgy. ‘And your point is?’

  ‘The technology works. It did work, therefore it can work again.’

  ‘And you asked me here to approve some form of repeat experiment, sending more of your masturbatory crap back to my time? Why would you even think I would be interested?’

  ‘No, listen.’ Fencer took several rapid breaths and tried hard to overcome his prejudice. ‘The tech works. It transports particles to a different space-time. Any particles. Any. Particles. A-ny Par-ti-cles. Any type of particle at all.’ He scrutinised Louie’s projected face, hoping that the hologram would get it.

  It didn’t. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ said Louie.

  Fencer knew he was just going to have to say it. He hated being in this position, but he had to offset his extreme discomfort against the possibility that he might have an idea that could save Slab and everyone on it from annihilation - or worse.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Pay attention. If you have any functioning verification routines in that antiquated piece of grund you call a host then run them.’

  ‘What the fu...’

  ‘Just shut up. I’m not accustomed to talking to obsolescent relics and I have no interest in your opinions, vulgarity or sarcasm. I can’t believe I am even trying to explain this to you but I’ll give it a go. There is a way to entangle a data array of physical matter into anything that exists in this space-time, even if it only temporarily exists in this space-time and is actually from another. I’ve proved it. Sis can verify the results, only you won’t understand them because you are a functionally illiterate half-entity.’ He held up his hand as Louie started to react. ‘Don’t even bother. I can emti you out of here and set up an exclusion zone faster than your kiddy-land onboard processor can complete a single cycle. I’m about to suggest a way that you and, Dice help us, only you, can protect us. Are you prepared to at least listen to my proposal?’

  Louie had to admit he hadn’t had a better offer all day.

  Over the next hour, Fencer outlined his idea in more detail than Louie could comprehend. What Louie did manage to understand was that Fencer had a way of encoding the DNA sequences the aliens were demanding inside a protective Nole®-based power sphere and then placing that inside Louie’s vDek and sending Louie over to the aliens by entangling the particles that made up his vDek with the particles in the alien shoebox.

  ‘We have to do something,’ said Fencer. ‘They’re asking us to put our entire heritage into a plastic tube and simply let them take it. If we comply, the second we let go, we’ve lost control. We’re powerless. Powerless over the most precious resource we have ever had. Something that’s taken the whole of human evolutionary history to develop. Everything that’s happened to us over hundreds of thousands of years is encoded in that data in some way. We could be placing it into the hands of paranoid genocidal maniacs.’

  Fencer was shaking. Louie knew that fear and genius were common bedfellows. But then, he thought, so are courage and stupidity.

  ‘Let me get this straight, kid,’ said Louie. ‘You think you have a way of encoding the DNA data they’re demanding and hiding it in my vDek and then sending me with it via this entanglement doohickey so I can suss out whether these aliens are good or bad and then it’s up to me if they can have it?’

  Fencer was exhausted. ‘Look, it’s just a proposal,’ he said. ‘You’re a council member. It’s up to you now to tell the others and see if they want to run with it. Sis has all the experimental data and technical strata and I’ll release it to the council. I wish to Dice it wasn’t going to be up to you to protect our destiny but I can’t think of another way.’

  ‘Don’t get so upset kid, you’re on a no-lose strategy here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Simple. If it works, you’re a hero, if it doesn’t, you’ll never know you failed.’

  ‘And that’s supposed to make me feel better?’

  ‘You have to learn to take the up-side when you can kid, we’re a long time dead. Well, at least, you are.’ Louie headed toward Fencer’s catering emti. ‘I guess they’ll get in touch if they think it’s worth a go.’

  ‘Does that mean you’ll try it?’ asked Fencer.

  ‘You have just offered me the chance of being the first member of our species to meet an alien race face-to-face or whatever they use for faces. How do you think I’d feel if I turned it down?’

  ‘If you were fully human, you would feel many things but the overriding one would be of regret. You would worry that you had thrown away the opportunity of a lifetime because you were too frightened to face the unknown.’

  ‘Then we can safely say that I am a lot more human than I look.’

  ‘I’m impressed,’ said Fencer. In fact he was astonished but he was trying to avoid baiting Louie.

  Fencer wouldn’t have been quite as impressed if he’d known how Louie was planning to use the leverage Fencer had just given him against the council.

  Louie emtied back to base and told Sis to inform the council about Fencer’s plan. Then he waited while they went through all the predictable gyrations and hand-wringing. They hated the idea. That is, they welcomed the idea of having something that gave them a modicum of control over the transaction, but they hated handing that control to Louie.

  However, the council did not have their customary luxury of circular debate and hedged decision making. The newsumes were looking for something to replace the repeats of the Snatch from the Trash (as they’d taken to calling Dielle’s extraction from Up Haven) and the SlabCitizens’ attention was returning to the enemy demand for DNA – especially as the repeater signs had started alternating between SEND CODE and NOW.

  ‘Council is getting twitchy,’ Sis told Louie. ‘They’ve given Dean Twenty the resources to prove his proposition but they want to buy more time and have requested a diversion to take the citizens’ minds off things. There aren’t any major Slabwide events scheduled for another ten days and it’s impossible to bring these things forward because the sponsors won’t allow it. However, we’ve been presented with an ideal opportunity that will hit two slits with one photon.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Louie. ‘We’re going to have a telethon.’

  twenty one

  Dielle’s ears were still ringing. A pair of eardrums grown from file copies of his stem cells had been waiting for him in the auto-doc of Kiki’s command ship. He could hear again by the time he got home, but the after-effects were going to take a while to heal and he’d been advised to avoid strenuous activity for a couple of days. With no possibility of sex, he’d spent the time catching up on sumes. He was surprised to learn that P
undechan Media had a new comedy show starring Kiki and was amazed when he saw it co-starred the same white-maned Ego Massage therapist he’d been having heavy sexual fantasies about for days. He couldn’t decide if he was more upset about not being told about the show or finding out that Faith-Sincere seemed to be a close friend of Kiki’s. Perhaps, he thought, they were just acting at being friends. If so, they were very good at it. The show was fast, sexy and very funny.

  Dielle had got up early enough to catch Kiki taking a shower before she left for her morning meetings.

  ‘If you really don’t care that I know about your show, why didn’t you tell me about it in the first place?’ asked Dielle after he’d told Sis to noise-cancel Kiki’s ablutions.

  ‘Reality show rules are really very simple, darling,’ she said. ‘You never openly discuss anything past the third wall and you try to never even think about it. It’s the only way you can go about your life without feeling self-conscious. It’s for your own good.’

  ‘You know, a lot of the things that you tell me are for my own good seem to be very good for you too.’

  ‘Of course it is darling, I represent you. If it makes you money then it makes me money - only a lot less than it makes you.’

  ‘As long as it’s my stuff you’re making money from. When it’s purely your stuff, it’s just good for you isn’t it?’

  Kiki shut off the shower and stood dripping wet for a moment. ‘Have you been talking to Louie?’

  ‘I haven’t spoken to him since I got back, why?’

  Kiki shrugged and started the hydrobeans. ‘Just the type of thing he’d say, that’s all.’

  ‘It doesn’t take a business gurulla to figure out that one of the main reasons Kiki Sincerely even got a chance was because of your role in my sume. People who have been following me have gotten to know and like you. I mean, that dress you wore to the Valley party was the highlight of the evening as far as the gossumes were concerned.’

  Kiki activated the moisturisers. ‘And you think that’s a bad thing? You did drop out of the sumes for almost three days you know. After the initial flurry of speculation, which, by the way, our people beat up into some pretty wild stuff, the numbers started to drift. You can’t afford a dip at this stage and The Farts are already downtrending due to your no-shows.’

  ‘They’ll come back when they hear the new stuff,’ said Dielle, feeling less than confident.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Kiki. She selected a hairstyle from a projected catalogue. ‘You don’t know how fickle the sumers can be. You haven’t established a consistently engaging sume for long enough for them to be locked in. You need a minimum of twenty-one days of sumer loyalty before you know they’ll ride the troughs. Up to that point they can afford to drop out because their time investment hasn’t passed their delayed gratification threshold.’

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

  ‘No, of course you don’t and that’s fine because you shouldn’t even be thinking about this side of the business - that’s my job.’

  ‘So you’re saying the only reason you started Kiki Sincerely was to keep the sumers interested while I was kidnapped?’

  ‘The kidnap just highlighted the need for a spin-off. In this business, diversification is the name of the game. You mustn’t take it personally, it’s just the way the sumers are. Today you’re a star, tomorrow you’re a footnote in the ‘pedia and it’s all over. You have to maximise every single opportunity while they’re open to you darling.’

  ‘But you’re maximising opportunities I’ve opened for you and I’m not getting anything for it.’

  Kiki looked at him through narrowed lids. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘You deserve an exec credit. How does two and half of gross sound?’

  Dielle thought gross sounded ugly. {[How does two and half of gross sound?]}

  [[If you are requesting advice I have to remind you that I must remain neutral in all intra-personal and commercial negotiations]]

  {[I’m just asking what it means]}

  [[Gross means total income after exTax and charges. There are other bases for percentage bartering. Another common one is a nett deal which assumes profitability and also shares risk. Nett deal percentages are usually higher than gross]]

  {[Higher eh?]}

  [[Higher and far less likely to produce a return on investment]]

  I wonder what Louie would do, thought Dielle, knowing that there was no way he was going to ask him.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that if you are offering two and half you can probably go to five but I don’t really want to make you feel bad so I’d say, um, four… and a half.’

  ‘Four and a half?’ wailed Kiki as if he’d just ripped out her heart, torn it into tiny, blood-soaked pieces and flung them around the wetroom so they clung to the walls, slowly trailing down the permaclean surface. ‘Are you out of your mind? No one can make a four and half points on gross exec deal work on sumes these days. You’ll have me begging for food!’ Tears welled in her eyes.

  Dielle put his arms around her. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said. ‘I’m new to all this.’

  ‘You don’t sound new to it,’ said Kiki sobbing gently against his shoulder. ‘Are you sure you haven’t been talking to Louie about this?’

  ‘Absolutely. I can’t stand the sight of that fat nose on his smug face. He gives me the creeps, especially when I remember he’s me.’

  ‘I guess I could just about go to four,’ she said.

  ‘Four is fine, darling. You tell Sis and whatever else you have to do to make it a deal and let’s forget about it, OK?’ He kissed the tears off her master-crafted cheek bones and for a second or more even forgot about Hope, or rather he placed the memory of her in an area of his consciousness called ‘pause’. He was happy that he’d at least stuck up for himself and showed he could get by without having to rely on others.

  Kiki lodged the deal agreement and felt happy too. Louie had been pushing for twenty-five.

  ‘Ah!’ said Kiki. ‘Hold a moment, hold just one moment.’ She leaned over and held onto a side rail.

  ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ said Dielle. She looked like she was in pain.

  ‘Nothing. Hold. One. Second.’ She held up her palm to him as she went into simulconference.

  A morphit scurried in with a pile of clothes that she scooped up and then headed, naked, toward the vexit. Dielle followed.

  ‘You will not believe the deal I’ve just been offered,’ she said, grabbing a hand of bananas from a fruit bowl. ‘I’ll see you later - or rather I won’t. This is going to be lookadatplus hipro!’

  Dielle watched Kiki’s perfectly formed rear leave an impression on the transvex. Those two circles were the last thing he saw before everything went blue. Blue as in dense, can’t-see-a-dicing-thing-blue.

  {[What’s going on?]}

  [[Blue day]]

  {[~~???]}

  [[Today has been designated as a blue day. Citizen Parque has chosen to go ahead and has generously arranged for Slab’s current reality participants to share in his moment]]

  {[Sefton? He’s going to do it?]}

  [[••]]

  {[Why can’t I see anything except blue?]}

  [[Today is a blue day]]

  Very helpful, thought Dielle. He put his hand in front of his face to test the density of the sky-blue fog that enveloped him. He could feel his breath on his palm before he could see it.

  {[What is this stuff?]}

  [[Blue]]

  {[Has one of us taken an idiot pill while I slept?]}

  {[It’s called Blue and it’s a prototype energy-sensitive aerosol emulsion. It is currently permeating all of Slab’s day sections with the exception of AllWeather which, as you know, is closed to non-authorised personnel and almost completely full of snow anyway]]

  {[But I can’t see anything!]}

  [[••]]

  {[Oh, I get it. The blindSider wants everyone to experience what it’s like to be him. How can he get away with this
?]}

  [[It’s a performance piece]]

  {[What if I want to do something?]}

  [[Such as?]]

  {[Anything. Take a shower for instance]}

  Sis outlined the wetroom doorframe and marked all the nearest danger spots in his visual cortex.

  {[OK. Fine. OK. How long is this going to go on for?]}

  [[Hard to say. It depends if Parque actually goes through with it before his credits run out. That will occur in just over eight hours unless Pundechan Media manage to negotiate further sponsorship deals and extend the compensation period]]

  {[Where’s Kiki gone?]}

  [[Meetings]]

  Why did that not surprise him, thought Dielle.

  {[Hey! Am I breathing this stuff?]}

  [[Yes, it’s super-oxygenated. How do you like it?]]

  He took a few deep breaths and felt as though he was floating. Spontaneous impressions of Faith Sincere prodded his subconscious and other parts.

  {[It’s cool!]}

  [[••]]

  {[What was that about compensation and what type of energy is this stuff sensitive to?]}

  [[SlabCitizens are entitled to financial reparation for any inconvenience caused by public art performances that I am unable to adequately offset. So far, most people are taking it in their stride but it is to be anticipated that claims will accumulate if the event is prolonged. The emulsion is specifically sensitive to the alien consciousness energy that infests humans and is designed to solidify along the path the energy takes when an individual checks out. If it functions to spec, it should leave behind a permanent installation that traces what some people refer to as the journey of the soul. It’s never been used on anything like this scale before so it’s generating considerable academic interest in the piece]]

  {[Where is this going to happen?]}

  [[The exact location is being kept secret in order to avoid contamination but a few selected friends and associates have been invited to witness the main event in person. You have the dubious privilege of being one of them and you are requested, if you choose to accept the invitation, to be ready to leave in one hour]]