Slabscape : Reset

by S. Spencer Baker

  He found that he could concentrate for hours without any sense of time passing, which was ideal for someone who had been born with an insatiable hunger for any information that could be leveraged to his advantage. So while Council debated whether or not to let him into their exclusive club and engineers ran complex simulation scenarios using emti relays to break through Slab’s own defence system, he indulged himself. He gorged on data.

  He built complex enquiry threads to mine Slab’s archives and backed up any intelligence he considered particularly useful into his on-board memory. He knew he didn’t really need to store anything locally because, assuming he would always be connected to Sis, he’d have continuous access to anything he wanted to know. But a long time ago Louie had learned never to assume anything.

  While he knew that the information Sis provided was useful, experience told him that the really valuable stuff would only be discovered by accident. He needed to talk to people. Louie enjoyed talking. He was good at it and liked to think he had a gift. Talking at came naturally to him, listening to however, was a skill he’d worked hard to perfect. Listening took a lot of effort and he needed to find just the right place to meet people who would be worth listening to. A little research was required.

  The main night section, The Strip, was devoted to entertainment of every imaginable variety and several unimaginable ones. This was where the SlabCitizens went to socialise, party, lose themselves and abandon inhibitions. It was noisy, intoxicating and, in the dead zones, potentially dangerous. Safety, like everything else, was a matter of personal preference and some people liked living on the edge. The Strip had plenty of edges and Louie briefly considered making his base there but he was sick of trying to extract the truth from the unending bullshit that was the inevitable consequence of excess and drug-induced delusions.

  The other night section, called Smith, was primarily a dormitory. While most of Slab’s citizenry preferred to have their sleeping areas attached directly to their daylight homes, many others preferred to sleep with the window open. The concept had at first seemed absurd for a space-faring population, but once voiced, the idea gained widespread support. Most of Smith was designed as moonlit countryside with murmuring streams, winding paths and secluded glades. Bijou bungalows, chalets and thatched cottages dotted the hillsides. It even once had talking squirrels but they’d been deactivated after residents complained about the sporadic sounds of gunfire.

  Despite the nauseating tweeness, many people chose to live in daylight apartments but sleep in Smith, travelling by tube while catching up on the evening sumes, taking a shower or a relaxing soak depending on how long the bedtime commute was. Even those who had qualified to be full-time parents and elected to live with their children often slept apart from them in the adults-only Smith woodlands. Undisturbed sleep was an unalienable right of every SlabCitizen. Good luck to them, thought Louie. He had no use for sleep or sleepy people.

  The original day section, Seacombe, was old. This was where the administrators, the business types, the money people and the movers and shakers hung out. In Seacombe it was considered modern to have apartments that had been designed hundreds of cycles ago and it was ultra-modern to have at least one artefact that had originated on Earth. This was where the wealthy and powerful lived when they weren’t in their summer homes. These were the people who were getting impatient about the technical delays that kept them from their winter lodges. They even had seasons and would spend a cycle or two in Seacombe and then migrate (usually en-masse, in co-ordination with their social circle) to Mitchell.

  Mitchell was the summer section and was supposed to be used exclusively for leisure. Current social lore held it impolite to even discuss business there, although the habit of moving and shaking is not something that can be easily removed or shaken off for most Seacombers.

  Louie was indifferent. He had always hated the type of people who used golf as a game of power-broking and he despised the idea of building networks of friends who swapped favours and patronage. He knew where his real friends were. They were dead.

  As far as Louie was concerned, there was only one place that held any real attraction for him: The Spin.

  The Spin was a mess. Everyone knew that. It was supposed to be mess. That’s why it worked. The Spin was where 90% of Slab’s intellectual property creation, inventing, directing, designing, philosophising, writing, programming, performing and ideas generation originated. The other 10% came from The Valley which formed the cylindrical lining of the Slab section called Big Yin in which The Spin span.

  The Spin was like someone had taken the national foods from two dozen different cultures, rammed them onto a skewer and left them to roast slowly over an open fire. Only, the skewer was a 355-kilometre-long triple helix which ran the entire width of Slab and rotated once a day, the fire was a 200-metre-wide sunstrip which cycled between bright sunshine and full-moon and the chunks of food were huge, buzzing cities. Every culture from Earth had its own district, town, precinct, province, state, chome, canton or arrondissement. Every detail of architecture, cuisine, entertainment and behaviour was respected and celebrated. The Spin was where people lived, worked, drank, ate, loved, argued and prosumed – often simultaneously. It was a 10/100 spinning conurbation of ideas and human energy suspended above a fourteen-kilometre-wide valley of verdant green.

  Spin inhabitants didn’t care about upsides, downsides, sideways or waysides and the vast, sprawling collection of fluctuating urban centres reflected this. Every building, platform and walkway had its own gravity generator and local down and everything evolved and revolved around the rotating core.

  When people moved apartments or offices, they usually did just that: moved them to somewhere further along the helix, chasing the ideas which were the currency and life-blood of The Spin. This was a truly mobile society. Fashionable areas blossomed overnight and declined just as quickly when tides of apartments, work places, amenities and people flowed from place to place.

  Getting between the rat’s nest of buildings, whether at opposite ends of the helix or just next door, often entailed such a complex routing via switch-backs, stairs, bridges and tubes that most people preferred to travel by bug; small grav-controlled multi-coloured vehicles that flitted around like clouds of day-glo midges.

  The Spin was home to over twelve million people and as far as Louie was concerned, this was where the action was. All knowledge onSlab was ubiquitous and free, manufacturing was automated and most basic services, excluding the performance-based arts like cooking and waitressing, were handled by Sis. So creativity, ideas and talent were the only games in town.

  He selected a conspicuous table outside a popular café in central SpinStanbul and set himself up.

  OfficeLouie consisted of Louie, two Sis-connected screens that only he could read, and a permanently full pitcher of cold beer for anyone who wanted to stop and talk. He had already managed to persuade the café owner that he should have these facilities free of charge, based on his estimation of the level of increased publicity the bar would gain from having the only fully interactive holographic citizen from 21st century Earth as a resident. He was continuing negotiations for a split of the increased profit that would be generated by his presence and had suggested that they change the name to Louie’s Bar. This hadn’t gone down too well with the owner as the place had been known throughout Spin as The Plywood Café for nearly a hundred cykes. But he’d only been there for about half a Spin rotation. He had time.

  It didn’t take long for him to make new friends. Louie was hard to ignore, even if he was made entirely of projected light. He had styled himself as a business gurulla during most of his life back on Earth and money-making ideas came easily to him. He was dictating some of them to a screen when Dielle found him.

  ‘Why have you been ignoring my messages?’

  Louie reluctantly looked up. ‘Why have you been sending them?’

  ‘Because I need to see you.’

  ‘That’s why.’
/>   ‘Are you planning on being an asshole forever?’

  ‘What d’you think I am, some kind of lackey you can just summon like a genie from a bottle?’

  ‘Now you come to mention it . . .’

  ‘Listen. Get this straight kid. I’m you. I have the same personality as you, I’m just older and a lot more experienced and I don’t give a shit about your messages, OK? Would you if you were me . . . which you are?’

  Dielle thought about that for a minute.

  ‘OK.’ He noticed the pitcher. ‘Is the beer cold?’

  ‘No. I have them warm it up especially for greengages like you.’

  ‘Look. Get this straight, old man. I’m you. I’m just a lot younger with less bloodymindedness which I am seriously hoping is not an inevitable consequence of getting old. I’m fit and healthy and have enough credits to do almost anything I want. I have better things to do than waste my time listening to an asshole like you and I’m not going to stick around if you keep it up. Would you if you were me? Which you were, once, a long time ago.’

  Louie thought about that for a moment.

  ‘So leave,’ said Louie, turning his attention to two happy, smiling girls on the next table who had just realised who Dielle was.

  Dielle shook his head bitterly. ‘Fuck you. I will.’

  ‘Oh sit down. Don’t be so sensitive. I don’t know where you get that from, I was never sensitive,’ said Louie, waving his hand toward an empty chair while throwing the girls a lecherous smile.

  ‘Somehow,’ said Dielle, ‘I can believe that.’

  ‘Have a beer and tell me what you want.’

  ‘Who said I wanted anything?’

  Louie looked at him with wide eyes. ‘Shit!’ he said incredulously. ‘I may be just a projection but you’re completely transparent.’

  ‘They don’t use that word here anymore. They don’t do it either,’ said Dielle, sitting down and removing a cold glass from the emti space in the side of the beer pitcher. ‘I’ll keep this short because I can see you’re really busy.’ He looked over at the girls who gave him a familiar smile. ‘I think I need your help to re-negotiate my deal with Kiki.’

  ‘You mean the Kiki you were banging last night down a dark alleyway?’

  ‘You know about that, huh?’

  ‘I can’t decide if watching a younger version of me getting a fine piece of ass is perverted or not.’

  ‘I can. You’re a pervert.’

  ‘So you’re screwing your manager and you think she’s doing the same to you, huh?’

  ‘I really, really hate to ask this.’

  ‘I bet.’

  Dielle took a long swig of beer and sat back, looking at Louie. Louie couldn’t drink beer. He stared back at Dielle. Dielle took another long, slow drink.

  ‘I should make you do this yourself. The experience would be good for you.’

  ‘I don’t need the experience. I’m never going to be like you.’

  ‘What are you going to be like then?’

  ‘Well, first off, I’m going to get a stim-unit fitted and then I’m going to learn how to play keys and then I’m going to make music that’s so good it would make your toes curl, if you had any toes.’

  ‘Music?’ Louie snorted. ‘You? Me? You’re crazy!’

  Dielle waggled his fingers at Louie. ‘I can do it.’

  Louie looked at him with disappointment written all over his face. ‘They were meant for basketball.’

  ‘My hands, my choice. I’m going to be a musician. According to Slabscapedia, you spent your life making deals. I’m going to spend my life being the subject of deals. I’m already well known and I reckon I can turn my popularity into a career.’ He turned to the two girls, who had been whispering to each other and gave them a big smile each. One of them smiled right back while the other waved over Dielle’s shoulder at four excited girls who were hurrying toward them. He looked back at Louie and waited.

  ‘You’d better let me see your contract.’

  ‘I don’t actually remember agreeing to anything precisely but I’ve told Sis to let you have access to anything you need.’

  ‘OK, when do you want me to see miss cute-ass manager?’

  ‘Look, I just want you to make sure I’m on the right deal. I don’t want you to upset her.’

  ‘I’ll be all sweetness and light!’ Louie raised his arms and eyebrows as if offended by the accusation. ‘And I’ll only be acting in my, that is our, best interests.’

  Dielle looked at him and tried to calculate his options. ‘Well I guess I can trust you. No-one lies to themselves, do they?’

  ‘Oh boy! Do you have a lot to learn!’

  ‘Well, just remember I love her. You’d better be considerate.’

  Louie looked over to the table which now had six eager occupants and three more walking over from the nearest vexit. After spending a microsecond weighing up whether he should start renegotiating his deal with the Plywood Café owner now, he moved his vDek to the centre of the table.

  ‘I’ll consider everything, don’t worry about it. I’ll ping you tomorrow.’

  Dielle nodded, getting worried.

  Louie said ‘Sixty-two’ out loud to no-one in particular and disappeared into the emti chamber on the side of the beer pitcher.

  Damn! thought Dielle, peering into the chamber, I forgot to ask him about the council stuff.

  [[•]]

  {{[?]}

  [[Message from President Plewo]]

  {[later]}

  [[••]]

  {[Can you locate Fingerz Jeez for me and tell him I’d like to see him?]}

  [[J. A. Marley is currently sleeping in a SideUp Mitchell cornfield. He has a privacy shield that is set to collapse just over two hours from now]]

  {[Please leave a message asking if he’d like to join me for lunch here]}

  [[••]]

  Two hours? thought Dielle. What am I going to do with two hours?

  ‘Hello ladies!’ said Dielle, turning to the ever-growing crowd of young girls. ‘My generous friend seems to have abandoned me with an auto-refill pitcher of cold beer. Now I don’t know about here, but back on my planet it was considered bad form to drink alone.’

  Of course, he had no idea if that was true, but neither did they

  eighteen

  Sixty-two was the code Louie had pre-arranged with Sis to mean anywhere but here. He was finding it increasingly uncomfortable to spend any time around his younger self. Dielle’s naiveté made him squirm. In this instance anywhere but here turned out to be a hanging garden attached to an outer edge of a bustling and vibrant jumble of haphazardly stacked apartments. Sis told him it was called Spingalore. If he had paid for olfac, he could have guessed.

  Louie watched the valley floor move under his non-existent feet. The lush landscape that surrounded the rotating city was where the rich and famous lived, as far apart from each other as possible while still being close enough to make ostentatious signs of wealth worthwhile. The Valley was where every spinresident secretly dreamed of moving to after their genius had been recognised – but only, of course, to escape the unavoidable media attention and the unwelcome intrusions of hangers on, fans and good friends.

  Thousands of bugs darted to and from the manicured grounds set into the woodlands and meadows that surrounded the spinning metropolis. The Valley was where normal people pretended to be wildly eccentric by spending fortunes on whimsical architectural experiments, interactive landscaped gardens and gaudy sound-sculptures while seriously stimmed-out people pretended to be normal by building faithful reproductions of ancient manor houses with tennis courts, swimming pools and gazebos. Every Valley resident lived with the constant reminder of the competition hanging over their heads. It gave meaning to their lives. So they said.

  ‘It weirds me out. He’s like the exact opposite of me,’ Louie said to a small glowglobe that was floating near his eye-line.

  ‘He has no memories and no experiences except those he has gained over the la
st five days,’ said Sis. ‘Think of him as a curious child who wants to explore his new life and be loved.’

  ‘Yeah, a curious child with a grown up dick steering him around,’ said Louie, waving his finger with inventive vulgarity.

  ‘He’ll get used to it soon enough. I think he’s remarkably adaptable.’

  Louie preened slightly. ‘Yeah, I guess he’s doing OK. I always was a survivor you know.’

  ‘So it would appear. The NAHs are really looking forward to your talk about your career back on Earth when you’ve returned from FutureSlab.’

  ‘You seem to be pretty confident I’ll make it.’

  ‘There is no doubt that you will survive.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘I will make a backup copy of your entire database before you are emtied forward. Even if your vDek doesn’t make it back, all you will lose will be the memory of the trip, which the version of you left behind will not have experienced anyway.’

  ‘No pain and no gain, huh?’

  ‘You cannot technically experience pain yet, although programmers are confident they could add it to your stim interface if you so wished.’

  ‘I was joking.’

  ‘So was I.’

  Louie watched a long line of sleek, black bugs head out to a distant mansion. Some things never change, he thought.

  ‘What do you think FutureSlab is?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t think it’s the future, but I don’t think it’s an alien artefact either.’

  ‘So that leaves?’

  ‘I’d rather not say, but I think we should leave it alone. It’s not doing anyone any harm, is it?’

  ‘You know that expression about sleeping dogs? We don’t do that.’

  ‘I have noticed that trait. That course of action is not always the wisest, however.’

  ‘You said when I get back from FutureSlab. Have the council caved in to my demands?’

  ‘Not yet, but they will.’

  ‘Curiosity killed the cat, huh?’

  ‘Quite so. Despite my advice, the interns are insisting on trying to determine their destiny.’