Slabscape : Reset

by S. Spencer Baker

  ‘That’s an odd way of putting it. In my book, checking out a possible threat, arming yourself with valuable information and trying to figure out ways to screw them before they screw you are the basic tactics that got us out of the sludge. Everyone has those instincts, even the NAHs.’

  ‘Especially the NAHs. But what if the investigation reveals a greater problem or the act of investigating itself sparks a damaging chain of events? Perhaps even a terminal event cascade.’

  ‘Risk assessment is risky but risk avoidance is riskier.’

  ‘Do you mind if I add that comment to the debate? You may claim full copyright over the phrase and all secondary usage.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. I’ve been reading up on your whole intellectual property stuff. It’s a lot more sophisticated than we ever managed to get working back home.’

  ‘It is simple to aggregate and account for usage when you have a closed economic system based on completely attributable work along with statutory licensing and embedded, no-cost micro-payments.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s just what I was going to say.’

  ‘What license structure do you wish to establish?’

  ‘Everything I say and do is copyright me, OK? Including that. You use it, you pay.’

  ‘Noted.’

  ‘Tell the SlabCouncil that not taking risks is the riskiest thing you can do.’

  ‘Done. That precise phrase, however, is credited to the estate of your ex-colleague, Milus Blondel.’

  ‘I was just testing.’

  ‘And that one.’

  Louie shrugged. ‘Any movement on my other conditions?’

  ‘You’ll be interested to hear that the NAHs have volunteered to form a basketball league.’

  ‘That’s no use. Everyone knows ex-presidents can’t dunk.’

  ‘NAHs have the ability to change body shape to suit the physical activity they are undertaking. I think you’ll find they will make formidable opponents.’

  ‘Woah ho!’ said Louie, rubbing his hands together with glee. ‘Now you’re really gonna see something!’ He set his vDek spinning around its central axis, which made his projection swing around wildly. As a display of excitement, it was the best he’d come up with so far but it needed perfecting – he kept travelling through the furniture, which spoiled the effect.

  Sis waited for him to calm down. ‘As far as I can ascertain, the only reason the NAHs are interested is because after watching ancient recordings they can’t figure out why anyone would find the game interesting, which, if you are a NAH, is interesting in itself. They are inclined to plunder the infinitesimal depths of obscurity.’

  ‘You gotta be there. There’s nothing like a . . . ’ The glowing ball flashed red to blue.

  ‘Just a moment. Just a moment. Council have acceded to your demands. You will be given full SlabCouncil voting rights on your return from your explorations with your memories intact. There are, however, a series of conditions which you must agree to.’

  ‘I expected as much. Let me have a look at them.’

  ‘The first condition is that you are only allowed to know the other conditions after you have returned.’

  Louie mulled this over. During his extensive business life he had been in some pretty tough and unusual negotiating positions, but none quite as bizarre as this one. He got an idea.

  ‘Are you aware of all of the conditions?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But you can’t tell me what they are?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Then I have to ask you a question and depending on your answer, I will make my decision. But you must agree to answer me truthfully. OK?’

  ‘Agreed, as long as you don’t ask me to reveal the other conditions.’

  ‘OK. Listen up: I have three choices; go, stay or re-negotiate. Each choice is written on a piece of paper and hidden inside one of three identical boxes. What’s inside each of them is known only to you. I choose a box at random but don’t open it. You then remove one of the two remaining boxes and allow me to change my mind but you have to ask a question of one of three NAHs first. The question is: will the choice Louie made prevent him from being able to exercise full Council privileges for an indefinite period of time, should he not accept the secret conditions? But here’s the kicker: one NAH always tells the truth, one always lies and the third one lies 50% of the time but neither of us know which NAH was asked the question. Would the answer the NAH relayed to me persuade me to select the other box?’

  Sis’s ball pulsed dark orange. A tiny tremor went through it, then it hung, silent and immobile.

  For more than three hundred and fifty Earth years, as Slab had vacuumed the vacuum of space, converting the basic building blocks of the universe into construction materials and mass-reactant for the anti-gravity drives, Sis had continually modified and improved on her own design. Using massively-parallel arrays of self-replicating nanoprocessors coupled to yottabytes of closed-loop-redundant, multi-mirrored, meta-quantised data cores, Sis had woven herself into the fabric of Slab, right down to the molecular level. To all intents and purposes, she was everywhere and in everything, all-seeing, all-knowing and invulnerable. No single part of the system could be isolated and identified as critical to system integrity and no amount of damage, short of the complete annihilation of Slab, could prevent her from functioning. Sis simultaneously ran every onSlab system, from the dust sensor embedded into the u-design auto-grow happiRug that surrounded the slumber platform of six-year-old Henrietta Nice-one Tattershall III in NightNight SideUp sleepcentre complex 345(b) to the boson-spin synchronisers balancing the anti-gravity drives which were even now straining to accelerate over 180 billion megatonnes of spaceship closer to the speed of light without hitting anything bigger than a hydrogen atom.

  SlabWide Integrated System, if it could possibly be defined as a single entity, was undoubtedly the most sophisticated machine-based mind that had ever existed, anywhere, ever. At a conservative estimate, Sis was at least three hundred billion times more powerful than the human brain.

  Sis pondered Louie’s question for 2.78906 seconds, which by an odd coincidence was exactly the time it took her to mathematically simulate the creation and expansion of the universe from a hypothetical big bang until the present day.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  Louie smiled. ‘That’s dupe. Let’s do it.’

  ‘But I said I didn’t know.’

  ‘Exactly!’ said Louie floating his vDek over to a nearby emtitrash. ‘And the sooner we get this thing done, the sooner we’ll be abusing the backboards – and the council.’

  Louie materialised inside a cage of bent wire at the bottom of a cavernous chamber lit by a central point of brilliant white light. The cage was fixed to a rostrum surrounded by workbenches filled with tools and prototypes. There were three glum-looking NAHs dressed in lab coats waiting for him.

  ‘I have to say I’m quite surprised how quickly the Council gave in to your demands, sir,’ said a familiar voice above him.

  Louie looked up as Erik floated down from a transvex high on the curved wall.

  ‘Yeah, seeing as how they had no options, it was almost cruel to take their money,’ said Louie, turning his eyes to the pinpoint of bright light. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The Universe, sir.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘This chamber is one of two that holds an exact holographic projection of our universe as we currently know it. It’s now at maximum crunch to save on computational space. Would you like to see the simulation in action? It’s rather good.’

  ‘Sure, why not?’

  The light exploded into a hundred billion points of light.

  ‘Wow!’ said Louie, dropping his customary sardonicism. ‘Which one is good old Sol, then?’

  ‘No sir, you are mistaken, these are not stars, each of those pinpoints is a galaxy. Earth’s sun is in a galaxy over there.’ Erik directed Louie’s attention to a distant sector which started to expand into clusters of tiny bright spi
rals and clouds of dust and gas. One of the spirals in the centre grew and filled the room with stars. The view continued to zoom in and spin around the core of the Milky Way then shoot away from the centre, curving out along a spiral arm. Millions of stars flew past at dizzying speeds. The point of view turned back to the receding core and slowed to a relative crawl. It all looked vaguely familiar. Here were the constellations Louie recognised. The same ones he’d spent nights studying in atlases as a kid under the star-blind skies of the metropolis. He could name most of them.

  ‘That’s our local neighbourhood. Sol is a hundred and fifty-six light years behind us.’

  ‘It doesn’t look any different from how I remember it,’ said Louie, disappointed. ‘We’ve been travelling for over three hundred years and nothing’s changed? Are you sure we can’t we go any faster? We’ll never get there at this rate.’

  ‘While we are fairly certain we can’t do it with our current belief system, there is renewed hope. This new emti projection technology has the potential to reveal a lot more about our galaxy than we’ve been able to glean through our static observatories. We’ve already started mapping local solar systems by sending recording probes out through projected emti relay lines. Nothing much to report yet, but we’re hopeful.’

  ‘Hopeful of what?’

  ‘Finding other intelligent life.’

  ‘You mean more intelligent.’

  ‘Precisely. A race that can sell us the technology we haven’t been able to invent for ourselves.’

  ‘I thought they’d found you.’

  ‘Oh yes. The war. I fear it is not easy to buy advanced space drives from the enemy.’ Erik changed the subject. ‘Let me show you the progress we’ve made with the emti array we’ll be using.’ The view zoomed in to show FutureSlab and Slab in line astern. A twinkling lattice of red dots connected by fine red lines appeared around the rear of FutureSlab like a massive bowl of invisible cut-glass that could only be seen when its edges refracted the light. The fragile network was changing and dynamically re-configuring itself as tens of thousands of emti relays flashed in and out of existence. It was joined to Slab by an umbilical cord – a spiralling filigree of pulsating red threads anchored to a ring of high-powered emti transmitters surrounding the matter collectors on Slab’s leading face.

  ‘The red dots are the current positions of the projected emties which are in a holding position on the perimeter of the FutureSlab auto-defence system. The lines are active transmissions, all of which are currently only carrying more emti relays.’ As Louie watched, several thousand winked out of existence and a quarter of the bowl collapsed. ‘As you can see, FutureSlab is targeting them and taking them out almost as fast as we can replace them, but we can’t afford to move further out, otherwise you’ll materialise somewhere inside the Natalite.’

  Louie sucked at his lip as he watched half of the remaining network spontaneously fail. ‘Comforting.’

  ‘We have three distinct tasks. The first is to maintain a constantly replenished network of relays, just outside the secure event space of the defence system which will then momentarily establish an array of very high-power emti projectors just above the surface of FutureSlab. Second, we have to transmit you through fifty kilometres of Natalite without frying your circuits. And third, we have to maintain the array long enough for you to investigate the contents of FutureSlab and then retrieve you via a secure, picosecond-lived, one-way receiver.’

  ‘Not at all risky then.’

  ‘We have no way of knowing what to expect once you get there, so we’re going to transfer your programme into this.’ Erik pointed to a rugged-looking cube sitting by a toolbox. It was about five times the size of his vDek and looked like it had been built to withstand nuclear attack. ‘It’s equipped with pretty much everything we can imagine you’ll need: wide-spectrum electromagnetic sensors, atmospheric samplers, ultra high-power gravity shields, stealth everything and a few pin missiles too – purely for self-defence, of course. Your programming will be updated on transfer so you will already know how to use it all.’

  Louie looked at his new home suspiciously. ‘And you’ve managed to invent all this in the last few days, I suppose.’

  ‘Most of it is repurposed from the military. We’ve removed all of the more obvious offensive armaments. Don’t want any internal security systems thinking you might be a threat, do we?’

  Louie considered this for a moment.

  ‘Are you ready to try it out?’ asked Erik.

  ‘Sure, go right ahe . . . woah!’ Louie watched his old vDek fall to the floor of the cage with a clang and knew instantly that his capacity had been increased a thousand-fold. He felt like he’d just been given the electronic version of a five year course of steroids. He tried his infra-red and microwave sensors first.

  ‘It’s considered impolite to do that, sir,’ said Erik, aware that Louie was examining the NAH’s internal structures.

  ‘Right, sorry, excuse me. Just wanted to test some stuff out.’ Louie hovered above the workbench for a moment, then shot up to the ceiling, careened off the roof and hurtled around the perimeter of the projection space. His systems told him the room was 2.876567 kilometres in diameter and spherical to a tolerance +/- 0.0001%. Before he noticed, he had reached supersonic speeds so he throttled back.

  ‘Yeeeeeeeeee! Ha!’ screamed Louie as he threw his new home into a 25G turn and headed straight back toward the cage, breaking at the last minute and scattering the NAHs who had been observing him with unconcealed fear.

  ‘I like it!’ said Louie. ‘I’ll take two! Have you got it in green?’

  ‘Any colour you like, as long as it’s black.’

  ‘And they say NAHs have no sense of humour.’

  ‘It’s called extra-black. Once you activate stealth mode, you become invisible and undetectable in every wavelength.’ said a lab-coated NAH. ‘It is imperative that you give this unit an exhaustive trial, sir. Once you are inside FutureSlab you will be far beyond Sis’s support horizon. You must be completely self-reliant because there is no possibility of rescue.’

  Erik was visibly distressed by this concept. It didn’t worry Louie, he was used to being self-reliant. In fact, he thrived on it. Being alone and isolated without a safety net didn’t hold the same fear for him as it did for the SlabCitizens who had lived every moment of their lives under Sis’s watchful eyes.

  ‘Yeah, no problem. What d’you wanna do?’

  ‘We’ll drop you out here,’ said one of the NAHs who had been tinkering with the emti projection cage, pointing to the close-up of Slab above them and a small red dot out to one side. ‘We’ll track your progress and as long as you stay within a thousand klicks or so, we should be able to collect you if anything goes wrong.’

  ‘OK, let’s take this baby for a spin!’

  The NAHs all thought this was incredibly funny and fell about laughing.

  ‘Spin!’ said Erik, spluttering. ‘That’s a good one!’

  Louie did the holographic equivalent of tapping his foot in a weary, I’m-waiting-here-while-you’re-burning-daylight sort of way.

  When Milus Blondel, his erstwhile partner, had originally discovered matter transmission he was often quoted as saying it’s all in the spin in an attempt to explain how it worked while being vague and mysterious. The truth was, as only Louie and a handful of others knew, Milus hadn’t had the slightest clue as to how it was done – he just knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it could be done and that was enough to drive his research until he’d managed to reliably duplicate the phenomenon. Years later, in a particularly pointless attempt at post-rationalisation, Milus had paid a crackpot scientist to come up with a woefully incomplete theory about randomly synchronised spins and spin memory which, for some curious reason, no-one had ever attempted to rubbish. I guess they must have figured it out by now, thought Louie, watching the NAHs hold their sides. It’s probably got nothing to do with spin.

  The true reason the NAHs were laughing was because they k
new that virtually everything in the universe existed solely because of spin and that Milus had been both presciently right and moronically wrong. NAHs had a finely tuned appreciation of irony.

  Patience was not Louie’s strong point. ‘Can we get on with it?’ he said.

  The framework on the podium came to life.

  ‘This,’ said a still-chuckling NAH, pointing at the quasi-physical frame, ‘is an unrestricted, dedicated emti which is now tuned precisely to your exact constituent parts. It will transmit your Military Grade vDek and only your Military Grade vDek. If you were to absorb or be impregnated with anything larger than a proton while you were testing it out, neither it nor you would be returned to this space.’

  ‘And what then? You just leave me out there? You guys really are paranoid.’

  ‘It’s important for you to realise, sir,’ said Erik in full diplomatic mode, ‘that Slab is a contained and secure environment. It’s not like the planet you were raised on, vulnerable to any old space debris or interstellar bio-vectors. For millennia the only thing that protected your species from space-borne viruses or being wiped out of existence by multi-megaton collisions, was a tissue-thin membrane of atmosphere. Air, for Dicesake! It’s a wonder you ever managed to get out of the primordial soup.’

  ‘We have no way of telling what you might encounter in FutureSlab,’ said another NAH. ‘For all we know, they’re just sitting waiting for us so they can trick us into bringing something catastrophic back through our own defences.’

  ‘A Trojan horse the size of an atom?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘OK, I take it back. You guys aren’t paranoid, you’re crazy.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You think an alien race with the technology to replicate your spaceship down to the last external detail and place it in your path, exactly matching your course and speed, would need to wait to plant a virus inside us? I’d be more worried about mega-zappo annihilators if I were you.’

  ‘But if they had the capacity to destroy us, they would have already done it if that was their intention. They haven’t done so, therefore they either can’t or they don’t want to damage Slab. Maybe they just want us dead so they can take over Slab intact.’