Slabscape: Dammit

by S. Spencer Baker

  He ran a diagnostic. The transfer had been successful. He was fully functional and his cargo was intact. He looked around. A log cabin. It seemed vaguely familiar. There was a single four-paned window above a sink piled high with bloodied metal implements. Outside, heavy snow, lit from below, fell against a black sky. An ancient pot-bellied stove spat and fizzed in the centre of the room, its amber-glazed portal was cracked and stained with soot. A tin chimney meandered through a blackened thatched roof. Moth-eaten animal hides hung from wooden pegs in the walls. The floor was a compact of dirt and dried blood. Not for the first time, Louie was glad he hadn’t paid for olfac. The only furniture in the room was a wooden table scarred by repeated slaughter and a rattan wing chair piled high with sacking and skins.

  ‘You took your time,’ said the sacks.

  The pile took on the rough shape of a brown bear which slowly resolved into the even rougher shape of an old man; a man with long, straggling grey hair, a long, straggling grey beard and long, straggling grey eyebrows with ear tufts to match.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ said Louie, unable to conceal his disappointment. He’d been expecting a massive future-leap into shiny, precision-clean surfaces with fabulous technology and a significant amount of awesome dupeness, not home from home with Grizzly Adams.

  ‘Never mind that,’ said the man. ‘Do you have the sample?’

  ‘Maybe I do,’ said Louie. He pointed at his modified vDek. ‘Maybe it’s inside this and maybe it’s protected by the kind of technology that instantly destroys itself if you try to tamper with it unless I give the say-so.’

  ‘What, like a Nole® or something?’ said the old man.

  That was a shock. If they know about Noles®, what else do they know about, Louie thought, desperately trying to regroup his strategy while masking his surprise.

  ‘Don’t be so surprised,’ said the old man. ‘We used to rely on them to power everything too. We expected you to try something like this. In fact, I’d have been disappointed in you if you hadn’t.’ He got up, pulled another bearskin off the wall and threw it over his shoulders.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, moving toward the door. ‘We have no intention of harming your spaceship or abusing the genetic material you have brought with you. Come on, I have something to show you.’

  He opened the door and stepped outside. Louie reckoned he was as much at risk inside as out so floated after him. The old guy looked up at a bright, blue-veined moon as flakes of snow settled in his beard. ‘Like it?’ he said. ‘We thought we’d keep one as a souvenir. Nice to have the extra light don’t you think?’

  Louie recognised the new full moon. ‘Very handy.’

  ‘Still, it’s not as pretty as the original.’ He turned and pointed over the roof of the log cabin. Beyond the curl of woodsmoke spiralling up from the cone-capped chimney was another, greyer moon. An older, more familiar moon. A moon whose patterns of craters and basalt seas had been burned into Louie’s memory from childhood.

  ‘Louis Clinton Drago?’ said the old man. He made it sound like a question but Louie was sure it wasn’t. ‘Born September 6th, 1996, North Central Bronx Maternity Unit?’

  Oh fuck, thought Louie.

  ‘Welcome home,’ said the old man.

  The history of human development is littered with misadventures, random screw-ups, deliberate errors and abject stupidity. According to the old guy, the fact that humans had managed to survive for as long as they had was either a miracle, an accident or an act of sheer perversity. However, events had finally overtaken them and now the human race was in terminal decline. When ‘now’ was was a matter of perspective. Time dilation being what it was, and the absolute relative speed of Slab being impossible to determine by local standards, the best estimate of ‘now’ in terms that Louie could understand, was several tens of thousands of years into his own future. It was, however, still his own ‘now’ according to his Slab-manufactured processors, which refused to accept an alternative asynchronology.

  The old man had introduced himself as ‘Poole, just Poole’. No other familiarity was forthcoming. He was a hermit but he was not alone. That is, he was alone because he was a hermit but he was not alone in being a hermit because everyone on Earth was a hermit too. Poole wasn’t just a representative of the dying population of Earth, Poole was the dying population of Earth. He and everyone else on Earth were clones: they were all called Poole, they all looked and behaved the same and had done for as long as anyone could remember.

  They still used emti technology for many of their everyday needs and, as had been recently demonstrated, they had also managed to turn emties into planet relocators and long-range sign propagators. Emties delivered anything Poole wanted and took away everything he didn’t from his mountain-side shack which was very nearly identical to all the other residences on Earth. All 214,285 of them. Give or take a few off-grid, hard-core hermits, that was the current population of the planet and it wasn’t going to get any bigger because everyone had insisted they have enough space to be one day’s walking distance (in snowshoes) from the boundary of their nearest neighbour. A population density of one Poole per 350 square kilometres was, it was globally agreed, the hermitical optimum. All food manufacture had been automated millennia ago and buried deep underground in hydroponic farms tended by non-sentient machines. Feeding less than a quarter million people wasn’t a difficult task, especially as hermits like to hunt and feed themselves.

  Cloning was an odd choice for a species, but as Poole had pointed out, after a while it all seemed to go just one way: his. Clone dominance took less than a hundred generations and once that had been achieved, as it inevitably had to, the desire for personal space dominated. For more than fifty generations, no human had been cloned from any DNA other than the Poole strain. Everyone was perfectly satisfied. Everyone left alive that was.

  ‘What happened to all the women?’ asked Louie after Poole had given him a brief précis of Earth’s history since he’d been frozen and shipped off toward the centre of the galaxy.

  ‘We didn’t really see any need for them,’ said Poole. ‘And they just wanted to talk all the time. Always talking, never saying anything.’

  ‘What did you do? Kill them off?’

  ‘Good grief no,’ said Poole, adjusting his bear-tooth necklace. ‘We’re not savages you know. We just didn’t replenish the stock.’

  Louie shrugged. ‘You never see anyone?’

  ‘Sure I do. My best buddy lives just twenty klicks from here. We often meet at the boundary between his place and mine for a night of drinking, old tales and fair craic. I just saw him a couple of years ago. He’s a jammy dodger! Good old Poole.’

  Louie let that one slide. He still wasn’t ready to buy into everything this crazy old coot was selling.

  ‘So why do you need our DNA?’

  ‘Clones are copies, you know. Exact copies. Or at least they’re supposed to be. Problem is every time you make a copy a little bit gets left off the end of the gene. It’s like making a copy of a copy of a copy, you know, eventually things start to degrade. We’re fading away.’

  Louie remembered enough basic genetics from his school days. ‘But you must have kept some fresh DNA back to renew the strain?’

  ‘Of course we did. We’re not idiots.’

  Louie knew there was a ‘but’ coming. He waited while the old guy opened a rough wooden cupboard and took a mug of steaming hot chocolate from the pristine emti inside.

  ‘Antiproton storm. Few thousand years ago. Humungous sun fart. No warning. Lasted for a week and a half. By the time it was done it had zapped every gene bank we had. Ruined everything. Bloody useless.’

  ‘Is that what caused the winter too?’

  ‘No, that was us. Global warming was becoming a pain in the ass so we nudged the planet a bit further out to cool it down.’ Poole looked out through the frozen window through three-hundred-year-old rheumy eyes and sniffed. ‘We may have overdone it a tad. I like it though. Everything’s so clean
and fresh in the morning. Tracking’s a damn sight easier too.’

  ‘But why didn’t you just ask us for a refresh of your DNA? We’re the same species after all, it would have been no skin off our nose.’ Louie paused to consider what he’d just said. Nose skin would probably have been enough.

  ‘We couldn’t. We had a world debate. Took bloody decades,’ said the old man. ‘Even clones don’t always agree with each other, you know. The signs were supposed to make you turn around but we had no idea where you were so we stationed a whole line of them along your optimum track. We heard nothing for generations. Many of us gave up hope, assumed the Noles® had crapped out as predicted or you’d run into something terminal. Then, several hundred years later, we got a tamper-detect from the outermost sign and knew it had to be you. You’ve been doing pretty well, eh?’

  Even though it was nothing to do with Louie, he felt instinctively proud. ‘There’s been a problem though,’ said Louie. ‘They haven’t cracked the speed of light thing. They’re not going any faster.’

  ‘It’s an energy thing, it gets tricky,’ said the old man. ‘You might not think you’re going any faster relative to your frame of reference because time has really slowed down for you. You think you’ve only been traveling away from Earth for a few hundred of our years but as far as we’re concerned you’ve been gone for over twenty-five millennia. When we finally heard from you we realised it was going to be too late for you to turn around. Devil of a job working out how fast you were going so we could match the vectors for the bait. You must have got something of mine if you tracked back to my gaff. What was it?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The lure with the DNA trap. Biscuit tin? Sandwich box?’

  ‘Shoebox,’ said Louie. ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘We had to empty basements all over the planet to find enough receptacles to stand a chance of hitting you. We had no idea where you were, just that you were somewhere between the penultimate and last sign. That’s a lot of space. It’s like trying to find a boson in a…’

  ‘Black hole, yeah I know. But if you didn’t know where we were, how did you do the shit with the repeater signs and the multi-dimensional wotsit and blurts on a sheed and so on?’

  ‘What on Earth are you talking about?’

  ‘Why all the posing as aliens and the disappearing trick with the moons and such? You only had to ask.’

  ‘We couldn’t. It’s against our nature to be beholden to anyone, even our own ancestors… or descendants, depending on your point of view. And anyway, the stop message is real. We’ve had emti-relay technology for a lot longer than you and we’ve searched the MacGoughin Sequester throughly and found nothing. There is no home planet. We thought we should let you know. You really are on a wild goose chase.’ His eyes flicked to a bird pelt on the back of the door.

  ‘There’s no way that would have worked. We wouldn’t have believed you.’

  ‘Exactly. The annihilation threat was the only way we could think of to force you to send us the DNA. Only we had to pretend to be some balls-out nasty alien race because if you knew it was actually us then the threat wouldn’t have been credible. There’s obviously very little logic in us wiping ourselves out.’

  Louie couldn’t argue with their rationale. He’d often had to resort to threats of extreme violence back in what he thought of as ‘the good old days’. Maybe he’d gone a bit too far when he threatened to declare war on Mexico over the Arizona Bay oil rights, he thought. Maybe.

  Louie looked out at the shining new moon. ‘Still, you could have just asked,’ he said.

  ‘No, you don’t get it. We couldn’t, that’s a part of the problem. We’re genetically incapable of asking anyone for a favour. We’re the last man standing and we barely interact with each other and we absolutely refuse to be indebted to anyone, any thing or any bloody organisation.’ Somewhere behind all that hair, Poole was scowling. ‘Stubbornness is inherited you know. We couldn’t even bargain with you, that’s why we sent a rogue A.I. to negotiate.’

  ‘A rogue A.I.?’

  ‘Yup, rogue as in eccentric. It’s staying. Says it likes it out there. It’s put all the other planets back where they were by the way.’

  ‘How come we couldn’t detect it? We thought we were talking to some weirdo pan-dimensional alien representative.’

  ‘Just goes to prove there’s a sucker born every minute - well, not in our case of course. The A.I. had a reflector hidden on the outer moon with another grav installation buried in the planet. Confluent gravity waves look like they originate where they join. Simple really, but, assuming parallel human development stays true, you won’t have the technology for another couple of thousand years.’

  Louie’s critical evaluation programming delivered a nil-threat return and, being relatively satisfied that he wasn’t about to damn humanity to a gruesome end, he made his decision. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘I guess you have as much right to this DNA as they do. You can have it.’

  ‘Thanks, that’s much appreciated,’ said Poole, putting his fur-clad arm around Louie’s holo. Louie was shocked - he could feel the weight on his shoulders. ‘But we already took it when you went through that doorway.’

  Louie knew he’d just become expendable.

  Poole read Louie’s expression and shook his head. ‘Don’t worry, we’re not going to get in a flap about one more inhabitant. How does it feel to have saved human civilisation?’

  ‘I’ve only saved your sorry ass,’ said Louie. ‘There are thirty two million humans currently hurtling towards a dead end.’

  ‘For now,’ said Poole. ‘Frankly we’re amazed you made it as far as you have. There’s a problem with the Noles® don’t you know.’

  ‘Should we warn them?’

  ‘No. Better not,’ said Poole, sucking on his stained teeth. ‘They might try to come back. I suppose we should send them a message to let them off the hook though.’

  Louie had never been able to resist a wind-up. ‘Or you could keep them hanging,’ he said.

  ‘You still don’t get time-dilation do you? You’d have to wait a thousand times longer than they would. For every day you spend here, less than a minute and a half passes on your ship.’

  ‘Screw that,’ said Louie. ‘Hey, can I be the one that sends them the message?’

  ‘Sure, why not? Saying goodbye to your old pals, eh?’

  ‘No, not exactly.’

  ‘I’ve got a terminal you can use,’ said Poole. ‘Knock yourself out.’ He looked at Louie’s vDek. ‘How’d you like to have a warm body to transfer into? Get yourself some legs and so on.’

  ‘You can do that?’

  ‘Son,’ said Poole as a hatch in the floor slid back, revealing a set of glass steps leading down to a neon-blue basement. ‘You won’t believe what we can do. Got some snazzy new genes to choose from too, thanks to you. You could have yourself some real fun. You ever take a twelve-hour snowshoe hike?’

  twenty six

  All normal activity onSlab was at a standstill. The tubes were empty, the frenzied roar of the dealing rooms was silenced, every sporting event had called a time-out and nearly a third of the professional partiers in ToNight High’s most hedonistic PermaSpree had sobered up enough to watch the countdown to the last moments of their nihilistic lives. The rest had ramped up the illicits and opened whatever bottles of really good stuff they had been saving for that special occasion. The gamers had all been notified of the crisis through an eye-level Sis interrupt and had agreed a SlabWide hiatus across all total-immersion platforms. The virtual dust settled over the galaxy-wide combat zones as they fell into an eerie silence. Even the war was paused as most non-paralytic adult SlabCitizens waited in a state of controlled anxiety (which, for the sake of public order, Sis was maintaining just short of hysteria) mixed with an oddly prescient excitement.

  The kids on their farms were excited for a different reason. It had been agreed that they should be spared the anxiety of their possible imminent destruction and had b
een told that the signs were a part of a test that Sis was running. In order to reinforce this most humane of deceits, Sis had a series of electro-works entertainment displays lined up to start when the last of the dots was erased from the screens - assuming of course that there was anyone left to entertain.

  Many sexually active males felt cheated that they hadn’t been given enough time to arrange a wild final fling with an as-yet unconquered object of desire. That hadn’t stopped them from trying. A torrent of highly optimistic, sexually explicit messages had been sent and largely ignored since the mixture of fear and curiosity generated by Slab’s first, and potentially last, credible ultimatum from an alien race, coupled with epic levels of anti-psychotics had produced a negative aphrodisiacal effect on the adult female population. The frustrated males had, naturally, resorted to the fivedees which meant that a significant number of them were facing eternity with their dicks in their hands.

  Most of the adult citizenry, however, had used their residual minutes to co-locate with their loved ones. Those who were too far apart had set up holographic comm links so they could reveal to each other what they now found to be the most important thing in their lives. It is a small testimony to the human species that the most commonly spoken words during the final ten seconds of the countdown by a ratio of 28,245,345 to 1 was ‘I love you’.

  The singleton was Dentrition Meni Hangman II, who was still incensed that his girlfriend had dumped him when he had become an intern twenty cycles before. The words he relayed to her messaging service (she had long ago placed an auto-divert on his feed), are subject to a current defamation of character dispute and cannot be revealed.

  Although Council had lost control over the dissemination of information about the alien demand, they had managed to maintain absolute secrecy about the finer points of their response. Some of the coarser ones too. The SlabCitizens had been told that the DNA had been delivered but it had been deemed prudent to conceal the fact that the final mechanism to protect the species had been entrusted to a crude interactive hologram of an even cruder old man.