Slabscape: Dammit

by S. Spencer Baker

  {[Sounds like a pretty special event, literally a once in a lifetime experience. Why wouldn’t I want to be there?]}

  [[Citizen Parque will be giving his own eulogy]]

  {[Ah!]}

  [[••]]

  Dielle’s curiosity overcame his better judgement. It was either that or the guilt-trip that Kiki laid on him when he hinted that he might not be there to keep her company. Whichever the reason, he was ready and dressed in a brand new set of sponsored clothes when Sis told him a complimentary Blue-free privacy bubble was waiting at Kiki’s vexit. Sis told him that the trip would take over two hours. Dielle knew this was odd because nothing onSlab was more than an hour and a half away by tube, even with the most circuitous routing. The reason for the extended journey became clear when the sensurround started. Dielle was expected to sit through the edited highlights of every sume that had ever been made from Sefton Parque’s prodigious output during his long and productive life. To most Slabsumers it was like an extended trip down memory lane. Here were the characters and stories everyone had grown up with. Here were the joys and tragedies of human perseverance, the loves and heartbreaks of adolescence and the struggles and triumphs of adult life. There wasn’t a living soul onSlab who didn’t have a favourite character from the Parque-life library. Except for Dielle of course. He slept through the whole thing.

  He stumbled out into the Blue at the final destination and followed Sis’s outlines to his predetermined spot. Sis refused to tell him where he was but he was sure he could hear the sound of rushing water through the muffling blue fog until he remembered that all of the water had been drained from the rivers and waterfalls because of the course change. Kiki wasn’t there to meet him so he queried her. She was in DND mode. Great, he thought, now I have to stand here for Dice knows how long in the pitch-blue with no one to talk to.

  {[Any idea what’s going on?]}

  [[There may have been a slight misunderstanding. Be advised there will be an indefinite delay]]

  That’s not good, thought Dielle. The whole event was being sumecast live by Pundechan Media and he knew how much Kiki hated being kept waiting. Moments later he heard the rustle of expensive fabric and the hurried breath of his manager, agent and lover as she took her place beside him.

  ‘Everything OK?’ he whispered.

  ‘It is now,’ said Kiki through gritted teeth.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Our darling Sefton tried to pull out when he realised the soul trace would be slightly off centre because we’ve recently altered track by about one thousandth of a degree. As if anyone would dicing notice! He was talking complete blocks of course. Just got cold feet. Lookadat!’

  ‘Is he still going to go ahead?’

  ‘You bet he dicing is. I made it clear that the only way we could afford to pay for all this was to use the advances from the books he would sell posthumously. No death, no deal.’

  ‘You mean he’s contractually bound to die?’

  ‘Have you any idea how much it costs to fill two million cubic klicks with this stuff?’ said Kiki. ‘Then there are the compensation claims which are escalating by the minute. It came down to two options: die a legend or live in poverty.’

  ‘Ladies, gentlemen, NAHs and others,’ said Sefton Parque, weakly. Sis outlined the body shapes of those attending. They were arranged in two concentric circles. Twenty close friends sat in the inner ring. Dielle and Kiki were among the forty associates and special guests who stood in the outer circle. Sefton was standing in the centre on a raised dais. ‘There are many things I have learned through my long, rich and productive life. There are many loves I have won and lost. There are many experiences I have enjoyed and endured. But nothing has prepared me for this moment of pure unalloyed fear. I have of course, as you would all have expected, prepared an oration to mark this momentous occasion. A requiem soliloquy. A solo narration upon life’s bittersweet convolutions. But then I became aware of two separate but equally important consequences. The first is that none of you, my dear, dear friends and temporary associates, actually want to be here listening to me talk about my life, my thoughts and feelings for three hours which is what it would take to speak it out loud, assuming I could actually get through it all without breaking down. You will all be able to sume it once I’m gone anyway so I have decided not to subject you to it in the here and now.’

  There was a collective, audible sigh of relief. ‘Dice, but he’s good,’ whispered Kiki. ‘That’s how to shift product!’

  ‘The second,’ continued Sefton, ‘is that I am absolutely sure that the longer I prolong this farewell, the less likely I am to have the courage to go through with it. I know what I must do. I must embark upon the next stage of my journey. Underneath my terror is the wide-eyed eagerness of a child, impatient to once again be reunited with those I have lost.’

  ‘He had his eyes reconnected overnight,’ said Kiki. ‘Spent the entire morning looking at a tattered photograph of a young girl. No one has any idea who she is.’

  ‘So now, without further ado,’ continued Sefton, ‘I will relieve you of this unbearable moment. But first, of course, it would be remiss of me not to thank all of you here and those who have played significant roles in my life.’

  It took almost two hours for Sefton to thank everyone he’d highlighted in his eye-linked friend-stream. He took wild detours to explain a small act of kindness or a funny or touching moment from his 832 cycles onSlab. Dielle had to request three large emties of buzz just to keep himself upright. Kiki had gone quiet. No doubt negotiating more business deals while she’s waiting for the poor bugger to exit stage centre, thought Dielle. He could see her traced outline and had shared a few witticisms with her as Sefton droned on, but she hadn’t responded. That was because she’d been called away by her production crew and had instructed one of her assistants to stand in for her under a temporary ID-transfer protocol.

  There was a faint rustling noise and Kiki whispered ‘Right, I’m back. Did I miss any highlights?’

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ said Dielle quietly. He couldn’t get the hang of whispering. It came out like a squeaky cough.

  ‘I had to approve a sensurround insert for tonight’s show. It’s of you having sex with Faith-Sincere. Steamy stuff. We’ll make a packet on the sellthroughs.’

  ‘I’m doing what?’ he said, feeling a mixture of foreboding overlaid with intense excitement. A couple of people sushed him through the Blue.

  ‘She seduces you against your will. It’s really funny. You can sume it later.’

  ‘I can what?’

  ‘You can check it out after Sefton checks out. We generated you in 5D using data from your stim-unit insin. The look and feel is great - no one will ever suspect it’s not you.’

  ‘I don’t even get to fuck her?’

  ‘We couldn’t hang around waiting for you to transgress any longer darling, there were two show’s story-lines hanging on this single inciting incident.’

  Dicesake, thought Dielle. I hope I enjoyed it.

  Twenty minutes later Sefton decided that anyone he had failed to thank would probably be grateful for being left out.

  ‘So,’ he said, raising his tone, ‘the time has come to talk of many things: of shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax, of cabbages and kings.’

  {[~~??]}

  [[He’s paraphrasing from an ancient poem, I think it’s his way of wrapping up]]

  {[Thank Dice for that]}

  ‘I weep for you,’ the writer said. ‘I deeply sympathise.’

  He sobbed.

  ‘This is great stuff,’ whispered Kiki. ‘We’ve figured out a way of recording the visuals without all this damned Blue in the way. He is actually crying into a huge pocket-handkerchief.’

  ‘Shall we be trotting home again?’ said Sefton and instructed Sis to withdraw all life-support.

  He slumped like a marionette that had had its strings cut. A burning gold light rose from Sefton’s crumpled body as the Blue reacted to the departing
energy. It traced the journey, transmuting into molten metal and searing a ghostly image onto the retinas of the awed spectators as it solidified. A filament of fire twisted and span above the podium for a few seconds, sculpting the shell of a perfect sphere, then flashed soundlessly through the æther on a tour of the assembled guests. Dielle saw gold threads emanating from some of the members of the inner circle. They intertwined playfully with Sefton’s energy, weaving skeins of remembrance, a dance of farewells.

  As soon as the circuit was complete, the trace disappeared leaving a rapidly cooling sculpture of golden filigree that looped and wove together, linking each seat to the central globe like a fairy carousel.

  Dielle was drained. He was about to complain to Kiki when the energy reappeared inside the ember-glowing globe above the dais. It oscillated for a moment, pulsating and recording, a spirograph of light. Then, with a blinding flash, it vanished.

  ‘Lookadat!’ said Kiki. ‘That was great! It’ll only take a moment to emti out all this gunk, then we’ll be able to see what we’ve got.’

  The Blue cleared. Dielle took deep breaths and wiped his tears under the guise of rubbing his eyes. Kiki was already standing near the centre, in a post-production meeting with her crew. Some of the guests were wandering around in a daze, others were examining the sculpture. It was apparent that while Sefton’s line had visited each of the inner-circle guests in turn, not all of those who claimed to be his closest friends had responded by engaging with him at a soul-energy level. The rueful had already sneaked away.

  Dielle interrupted Kiki’s debriefing. ‘Aren’t you going to do anything with Sefton’s body?’ he asked.

  Kiki walked over to the crumpled mound of clothes. ‘Right,’ she said, then she raised her voice and pointed to the corpse. ‘Can somebody emti this to recycling please? Keep the handkerchief.’

  The Slabscape came back into view. They were in a small, manicured park surrounded by a bamboo forest that swayed and swished in the katabatic breeze. A tea-house stood on stilts in the middle of a grav-locked ornamental lake. Dielle could see the upper levels of several blade-like towers in the distance. {[Where are we?]}

  [[Seacombe UpSide. About fifteen minutes to the negative Y from your apartment, level 25. This park was especially commissioned for the piece. It hasn’t been named yet]]

  Dielle was about to suggest one when the female assistant who was collapsing the portable emti she’d used to remove the writer’s remains called out. She pointed at the fine gold rod that supported the globe in the centre of the sculpture. ‘This goes straight down and through the decking,’ she said. ‘Sis says it tapers off to nothing about twenty levels below the form.’

  ‘That’s not right,’ said Kiki. ‘It was supposed to have gone forward toward the MacGoughin sequester. What the Dice?’

  ‘Ohh!’ said the assistant. ‘Maybe he went to hell!’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Kiki, massaging her temple. ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  twenty two

  The caverns under the Ustorian Alps had been designated a Blue exclusion zone and closed to all non-essential personnel. Essential personnel were those who could contribute to the process of figuring out how to make Fencer’s apparatus entangle matter as well as data. Fencer was given the role of project leader and charged with overseeing the largest-ever confluence of theoretical physicists’ brains in human history. Some of those brains were marginally resident in living humans but most were in substrate and being channelled by a group of lab-coated NAHs who had been assigned to the task. Sis had been busy manufacturing banks of photonic processors which would be needed to handle the time-, space- and mind-bending metamathematics. By Fencer’s reckoning, they needed two mountains’ worth. He was out by a factor of ten.

  No one had any idea how long they had to crack the problem, and if it hadn’t been for the data generated when Fencer sent The Farts’ recording back to twenty-first-century Earth, no one would have even tried. The equations that describe the laws of physics proved it was impossible, but the data said it had already been done, so it didn’t matter what the theories said, empirical evidence trumps theory every time. Fencer spent a lot of time reminding everyone that at the most fundamental level, there is no difference between matter and data. One is just a manifestation of the other.

  All of Fencer’s immediate neighbours had been evicted and their workshops requisitioned. A second, identical lab had been set up on a starboard-side escape ship in case anything went catastrophically wrong at the main site. The NAHs on that ship mirrored everything that Fencer’s crew was doing, but with a fifteen minute delay.

  A third lab had been set up in a secret location and staffed by those physicists who were refusing to concede that Fencer’s data was genuine. They were rumoured to be working on an exact antithesis of the entanglement mechanism. It was also rumoured that they were making great progress, but no one in garageland was falling for that old trick.

  Within four hours they had discovered, verified and published two new theorems, finally proving, beyond doubt, that String Theory was what everyone had suspected it was all along: complete blocks. They had also, almost by accident, opened a tantalising door onto a method for removing the dark energy from sequential quanta of interstitial space in order to create a localised temporary collapse in space-time. Fencer was impressed. Now this, he thought, surveying the chaos of his laboratory, is the way to get proper research done.

  Eight hours later they had successfully demonstrated the matter entanglement procedure, sent human DNA from one lab to the other and verified that the transported specimen was intact and genetically viable. And hardly anyone had been blown up. No one could explain how the sample had apparently arrived before it was sent, or why the power generated by the experiment was greater than the power needed to make it work, but they didn’t have the time or mental bandwidth to investigate. Fencer was exhausted and elated but even his highly specialised meta-brain was having trouble comprehending all the ramifications of what they were doing.

  Shortly after Sefton Parque had finally gone ahead and gone ahead, Sis announced to council that the tech was verified, tested within all available limits, transported to the inner dome on the round dance round and installed, ready for use.

  As usual, the impossible science had been relatively straightforward. Getting Council to agree to use it was the hard part.

  twenty three

  Back on Earth, before Slab was even a blueprint, Louie had been the frequent target of media attempts to investigate and expose his business dealings. He’d been able to mitigate most of the damage through a combination of bribery, threats and the judicious use of private security companies. In one case he’d had to buy a national newspaper and promote a team of journalists on condition they re-wrote an exposé to be more sympathetic to his point of view. He had a personal PR department engaged in a constant effort to feed only good-news stories, smother the negative ones and find positive spins on those that made it out into the public domain. He’d made sure his two previous wives had been locked into separation agreements that guaranteed their secrecy in return for very large stipends, and both of his daughters had generous allowances that were renewed on a monthly performance basis. They may have refused to talk to him, but at least they were sensible enough not to talk about him. Consequently, the true story of Louie Drago’s life and business career had never come out. Now that everyone who could have legitimately sued him was long dead, and it was entirely possible he was about to make a giant leap for mankind, a leap that was with absolute certainty a one-way ticket, Louie thought it would be an ideal time to let the truth be told or, as he liked to think of it, set the record straight.

  ‘Can you ping Kiki Pundechan and tell her we have a deal on the bio-sume?’

  ‘Done,’ said Sis. ‘Do you wish to record your veto points now?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess. You guarantee whatever I say to you goes no further?’ said Louie.

  ‘Don’t trust me, trust the Initial De
sign.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know, absolute A.I. integrity.’ He was still doubtful. Hadn’t Sis lied to everyone already? Maybe many times. ‘Ah fuck it,’ he said wearily, ‘if you let this out I’ll know it was you and if it takes me a million years I’ll find a way of getting back at you.’

  ‘I have absolutely no doubt you would. I have opened a secure tunnel to my tertiary over-mind. It is that mind that monitors my own actions for ID compliance. Proceed.’

  Louie told an especially encrypted section of Sis’s hyperconsciousness the secret he didn’t ever want to be revealed to anyone and specifically not to a certain freshly reset young man. He told the story of his uncle, the sole member of his family he’d felt close to when he was growing up. He was the only one who had ever shown him any emotion that wasn’t delivered by the back of a hand. His uncle had taught him the most important lesson of his life: the true meaning of the word ‘money’. He’d made Louie understand it in his bones, initially through a string of lies and cons, taking everything Louie had saved from his evening and weekend jobs. Then he’d shown him how to make a profit from nothing, by cutting deals where others benefitted from simple market-style trades but none as much as him. And he taught him to never, ever, risk all of his own money when setting up a business. In Louie’s rather stunted emotional development, his relationship with his uncle was probably the closest he’d ever got to feeling loved by anyone.

  ‘One thing he said over and over,’ said Louie, ‘was always have a Game Fund. A Game Fund was his name for the chunk of money you had stashed away somewhere safe that you could call on when you needed to act fast to make a big score. Having a decent Game Fund meant you could grab an opportunity when it came to you. These things go by in a flash and you need to have instant access to a stake that gets you into the game when the door cracks open for that split second.’