Slabscape: Dammit

by S. Spencer Baker

  Louie snapped his holographic fingers silently.

  ‘Always make sure you’ve got a Game Fund Lou, he used to say to me, and you’ll never be left out in the cold. Of course, getting that Game Fund in the first place took a lot of graft, especially when you were living hand to mouth like I was. Then, three months after my seventeenth birthday, he died.’ Louie shook his head, recalling one of the darkest moments of his early life. ‘Just went out like a light. Fighting fit one day and in a hospital bed the next, fighting for breath. The last words he ever said to me was Game Fund! He held my hand and forced out the words. I was sure he was smiling. Three days after the funeral I found there was a bank account in my name with nearly three thousand dollars in it. I couldn’t believe it. I was just about penniless at the time and it was a couple of weeks before the big New Year hockey game. Whoever thought of holding it in an open-air stadium in Michigan in the middle of one of the worst winters on record was some kind of genius, I can tell you but they’d already sold nearly a hundred thousand tickets and they reckoned they were going to set a new record.

  ‘There was this kid I knew. Local egg-head. Chemistry nut. He was always blowing things up, you know, just for the hell of it. He was pretty whacko but he came up with this really dupe idea. He’d sourced these re-sealable drinks cartons made of a special insulating plastic. They were supposed to keep juice cold but they’d keep stuff hot too. He took one of those elasticated tube bandages you put round your knee when you sprain it and stuffed one of these cartons inside filled with a chemical that gave out a shit-load of heat if you shook it up. Instant hand warmers. He needed someone to stake him and sell them and I had the Game Fund and an old buddy of my uncle’s was running security so I had an in. We were too young to rent a truck but he had a sister who was twenty-five and had a driving license but she was an even bigger whack-job than he was. Real stupid too. Took like ten hours of solid driving to get to Ann Arbor and she didn’t say a single thing that made any sense the whole time. There or back. We used to called her Spot and she never figured out why. I swear the only cerebral thing she ever did was haemorrhage.

  ‘It was my idea to dye the tubes either red or blue, which were the colours of the teams so no one cared when the dye came off on their hands. I tell you, hockey fans are nearly as crazy as the players. It was minus ten! The hand warmers cost us about twenty cents to make and we were selling them for twenty-five bucks a pop and no one was complaining about the price. The egg-head was outside in the rental filling these plastic cartons with the magic potion and puking all the time because it was highly toxic and me and a couple of local wiseacres were inside the stadium selling them as fast as his dumb-ass sister could get them to us and all the time it’s snowing like crazy and there’s a bunch of animals trying to kill each other on the ice that was so far away you couldn’t even see the puck. It was great!

  ‘Anyway, I turned uncle’s three grand into thirty-five inside a coupla hours. I never even saw the game but that’s the stake I used to sucker the investors for my first business and I never looked back. I couldn’t have done it without that money my rotten old uncle left me. I owed it all to him. Or so I thought. Thing is, there was never a will or anything. I just assumed it was from him. After all, the title on the bank account was GF.’

  ‘Is that it?’ said Sis.

  ‘Yup. You breath a word of this to anyone and I swear I’ll fry your ass.’

  twenty four

  When it came to having to deal with the Council, Louie preferred being back on the bridge of the escape ship. It allowed him to trawl the information streams and interrogate Sis while the interns tried to outmanoeuvre him and there was the added benefit of avoiding the wizards. For some reason he couldn’t put his finger on, wizards always seemed to be intent on pushing his buttons. But Louie knew that if he was going to get his way on this one, it had to be a showdown. He emtied into the centre of the forum which Sis had created in a dusty piazza surrounded by rickety-looking wooden grandstands in front of adobe terraces with orange tiled roofs. Nice to see Sis hasn’t lost her sense of humour, thought Louie.

  The SlabCouncil still hadn’t fully grasped just how useful it was to have a venal, self-interested, amoral hologram in their midst. Louie may well have been a shoo-in for the biggest PITA in the known universe, even if he would have refused to turn up to collect the award, but when it came to having to send a street-wise emissary over a one-way, soul-splitting conduit, he was the obvious, and only, choice. If Louie hadn’t existed they would have had to have invented him and, because of who they were, they would have screwed that up for sure. It still didn’t mean they were going to show gratitude to an ingrate though.

  ‘If you double-cross us,’ said Ethless the not as beautiful as she used to be, ‘we will do unspeakably painful things to your reset.’

  ‘You think that’s going to bother me?’ said Louie using his best anti-bluff-detection scowl. ‘I’ll be so far out of here you can force him to eat his own eyeballs for all I care.’

  ‘I’m glad you are leaving us,’ she said. ‘The Slabscape has been polluted by your presence long enough.’

  ‘You are so full of shit I can’t even find words to describe it - and believe me, I know a lot of words that could,’ said Louie.

  The real problem for any of the council interns and especially the NAHs was that they had been born (or created) into a world that was completely devoid of the sort of circumstances that had made Louie who he was. It wasn’t really Louie’s fault that the council members found him obnoxious, it was more their fault for never having experienced life as a form of combat. Their technology was designed to protect them from the type of things that humankind had had to deal with for hundreds of thousands of years. Louie was simply better adapted to it than they were.

  They didn’t stand a chance.

  ‘I have had access to Sis for 25,764 seconds at this mark. I am autonomous, self-determined and have my memories integrated into my program,’ said Louie impersonating the machine he was. ‘I will be among the aliens with human DNA. Now try to imagine what I could do.’

  In truth, Louie wasn’t a big hitter when it came to imagination. He’d always considered that the ability to conjure up a future filled with fearful consequences to be a serious weakness, however he was aware that others could and would do this at the merest hint of a threat. He had no idea what he might do with a few million cells filled with enzymes and mitochondria coupled with a completely new and alien technology but he knew for sure that the council members could dream up a large number of game-over scenarios without stopping to draw breath.

  Ethless paused to accept incoming missives. ‘OK,’ she said with something between a groan and a sigh, ‘you win. I’m sorry we tried to threaten you. We need you to protect Slab from whatever is out there. Please.’

  ‘Well, you only just used the magic word!’ said Louie as if the last few minutes had evaporated with the morning mist. He span around cheerily and gave the rest of the council one of his best shit-eating grins.

  ‘Alright, what do you want?’ said the Ghandi avatar wearily.

  ‘I want you to duplicate me with a complete set of my memories and leave me here so I can continue on this journey with you bunch of losers and at the same time go to wherever this entanglement doohicky leads.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ said an Erik. ‘It contravenes all of our protocols and safety procedures. We will never allow duplicates of individuals to exist in the same time-referent.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Louie.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said a cloud-shaped avatar, ‘if that was allowed then we would be forced to accept further duplication and that could eventually lead to a mono-culture of dominant clones. It must never happen.’

  ‘So you won’t allow what I’m asking for?’

  ‘It’s not even a choice we are empowered to make,’ said Ethless. ‘Initial Design mandates that Sis is programmed with clone-prevention technology. Even if we wanted to duplicate you
and allow the original to continue to exist, we couldn’t do it.’

  ‘Never?’ said Louie with a heavy menace.

  ‘Not ever,’ said Ethless.

  ‘So how do you explain that there is currently an exiled version of me heading off towards some Dice-forsaken part of the galaxy in a spaceship that looks like an oversized snow globe?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Ethless.

  The fuzzy blue Richard avatar intercepted. ‘Technically speaking, you were not restored from backup until Louie six had left our space-timeframe and therefore Sis did not violate I.D.’

  ‘I just love the way you think you can lie to me and get away with it,’ said Louie. ‘You not only know you can do what I’m asking for, you’ve already done it. You want me, that is the me I know to be the only version of me to send myself down some one-way quantum tunnel so that I can suss out who these aliens are and protect the DNA of our species, which, by the way I can only do by an act of self-immolation and yet you still persist in trying to swindle me.’

  ‘It’s nothing personal,’ said Ethless, ‘we just don’t like you.’

  ‘You’re a bunch of hypocrites and piss-poor liars. I earned the right to be a council member and now you are trying to get rid of me.’

  ‘If you believe that to be true, why would you bother fighting to keep your place among us?’ asked Richard.

  ‘Because I’d rather be on the inside looking out with the full knowledge of what’s really going on than out there with the mushrooms knowing that you were more interested in hiding your mistakes than actually doing your job.’

  ‘That’s unfair,’ said Richard.

  ‘Bite me,’ said Louie.

  ‘Our only motivation is to do the best we possibly can on behalf of the citizens. We are anonymous to them and have no personal power. We can’t do anything that will directly benefit us as individuals more than it will benefit the majority. We have a far better system of government than anything you experienced in your physical lifetime. Your leaders were self-interested power-seekers and corrupt officials. You allowed people who valued power more than anything else to actually have it. And yet you criticise us?’

  ‘Look,’ said Louie, ‘I’m not going to even try to defend the system we had back then. That’s not the point. You guys were supposed to be my future. This,’ he waved his arms around in an attempt to encompass all of Slab, ‘was our hope for the future of mankind. We believed we were building something better. And anyway, just because you are a bunch of hypocrites and piss-poor liars doesn’t mean you aren’t trying to do the right things. The slime-shit politicians I had to deal with were among the world’s most accomplished liars and they got up to stuff that would make your subterfuge look like a garden-party indiscretion. If they did anything right it was either by accident or because it served their self interest - and I still had to do business with them.’

  ‘Let’s cut to the epilogue,’ said Ethless. ‘You are saying that you will only acquiesce to being entangled with the intrusion and protect our DNA against the aliens if we agree to re-install a backup of your database in an identical vDek after you have departed?’

  Louie shook his head. ‘No and no,’ he said. ‘First I want my old Military Grade VDek back with all the sensors and extra power. I don’t need the pin missiles or any offensive weapons but I’ve had enough of dawdling around in this thing when I know you have better tech I can inhabit. Second I want to see me before I go.’

  ‘Can’t be done,’ said an Erik. ‘Breaks I.D.’

  ‘Change it,’ said Louie.

  ‘Can’t,’ said a chorus.

  ‘Can,’ said Louie. ‘You modified the I.D. when we let Sis triplicate herself. You can change it for long enough for me to verify you have honoured your word.’

  ‘Can’t you just have faith that we will honour our word?’ said a parrot.

  Louie looked at him hard enough to make his feathers fall. ‘Name me a single thing you have done since I was reactivated that would make me trust you.’

  ‘We gave you your position on council,’ said Ethless. ‘We fulfilled our agreement even though we could have easily denied you and you would never have known it had happened.’

  Louie could tell that she had voted against. He had a nose for bitter resentment.

  ‘Nevertheless, I’ll see me in a fully functioning MGV or you can send your precious DNA off into the void without a safety net.’

  A tremor went through the interns like a Mexican wave. Furries bounced, parrots flapped, dragons snorted sparks, diaphanous angel-types fluttered diaphanously, swamis lost their cool. Louie assumed they were reacting to his ultimatum. He was wrong.

  ‘Dicesake!’ breathed Ethless.

  Two holographic images appeared above the arena, one showed a live view of the grey-banded gas giant that used to have two moons and then had one. Now, it had none. The other projection showed the red screen. The words SEND CODE alternating with NOW had been moved up to the top and below them was the familiar target design of rings and dots that represented the grey planet’s system or a chain of BodiCon outlets, depending on your point of view. The dot that corresponded with the grey planet had turned black. Under the diagram was a horizontal row of variously sized discs ending in a exclamation mark. The discs were all white except for the one on the extreme left. It was black.

  Louie was pretty sure he knew, but he couldn’t help asking. ‘Did what I think just happened, just happen?’ He asked to no one in particular.

  ‘There were originally thirty-four planetary bodies in that system, and there are now only thirty-two,’ said an Erik. ‘There are thirty-two dots left in that line at the bottom of the sign.’

  Everyone in the forum watched the screens. Everyone throughout Slab who was anywhere near a repeater stopped what they were doing and watched a screen while the word spread.

  ‘They can’t zap a planet the mass of a gas giant,’ whispered Ethless. ‘Can they?’

  The gas giant disappeared.

  There was a moment of stunned silence and then everyone started running around and shouting. Everyone except Louie. Louie didn’t do panic. He turned to Ethless the Bedraggled and asked; ‘What does Sis have to say?’

  ‘I refuse to repeat it,’ she said.

  ‘Did it start with an F?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ethless, miserably.

  ‘The shot clock is draining,’ said Louie. ‘It’s decision time.’

  It took 762.21 seconds and the loss of three planets and twenty-two moons for council to cave-in and ratify the modification to the Initial Design that allowed for a duplicate sentient personality to exist onSlab with the codicil that the coexistence would be for less than five minutes. They were cutting it fine. The planets and moons had been vanishing at a variable rate that was clearly in direct relation to their mass. Small moons took a few seconds, Earth-sized planets less than a minute and the gas giants up to four minutes each.

  Sis procured a de-fanged MGV, loaded it with all of Louie’s memories up to that moment along with a copy of his interactive personality and emtied it into the arena. For the next few minutes the same consciousness would be recording the same events through the same filtering criteria but from different perspectives. Academics would write papers about this unique moment for cykes to come. Professors would lecture endlessly about the significance of multiple consciousness and never reach a useful conclusion. Louie didn’t give a damn. He watched Louie 8’s MGV do a couple of test laps of the bullring and come to a crash-stop in the centre.

  Louie 8 watched Louie 7’s pathetic-looking vDek sidle up.

  ‘Thanks, I guess,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, you’re welcome,’ said Louie 7. ‘Dupe?’

  ‘Dupe.’

  The council’s avatars of freaks, wizards, birds, warrior princesses, fuzzy clouds and icons from the past sat on the bleachers and watched, outwardly silent and inwardly in turmoil.

  ‘Your decision-making criteria parameters have been uploaded with everything we can think
of in terms of evaluating the aliens you will face,’ said Ethless to Louie 7. ‘Ultimately, it’s going to be a judgement call - your judgment call - and the only way we will know if the outcome has been successful is if we are not wiped out after the last planet disappears.’

  The small planet nearest the sun dropped out of existence. Three left.

  ‘Let’s do it. Give me the gene soup,’ said Louie 7.

  ‘You’re taking all this rather casually,’ said Ethless. ‘You’re about to go on a one way journey into the complete unknown. Have you no qualms?’

  ‘You should try being a hologram,’ said Louie 7. ‘It gives you a whole different perspective on life, eh?’ He nodded toward Louie 8, who winked back.

  ‘We’ll emti you to the site of the alien artefact,’ said Ethless. ‘That’s where the entanglement will occur. You’ll be melded with the DNA sample inside a new Nole® as you transit. Bear in mind it is an integral part of your internal power system and cannot be separated from you without your encrypted access codes. Any attempt to interfere with it will result in it disintegrating and you with it. Do you have anything left to say to your clone?’

  The two Louies looked at each other and smiled. Then they high-fived and went into an elaborate series of rotating celebrations that terminated when Louie 7 was emtied out of the arena into the protective sphere of the round dance round and then into a quantum entanglement that would decide the fate of nearly 32 million people, most of whom were anxiously waiting to see what was going to happen when the last ringed planet vanished.

  twenty five

  From Louie seven’s perspective, the process had been simple, painless and instantaneous although, for one suspended moment, he’d experienced being as one with a shoe box. That, he thought, is going to go down as the second weirdest thing I’ve ever done.