Slabscape : Reset

by S. Spencer Baker

  Louie knew that arguing with paranoids was futile, but he couldn’t break his compulsion to make everyone see things his way. However, he also had a very short deferment tolerance.

  ‘OK, OK. Just don’t leave me out there forever, alright?’

  ‘Of course not!’ said Erik, horrified at the idea. ‘We would simply have to come up with a way of transferring your clean data into a new MGV before we vaporise that one.’

  Louie manoeuvred into the framework and settled in the centre. ‘I feel like I should be holding my breath or something,’ he said. ‘Go on, hit the juice.’

  Then he was outside, instantly aware that he was looking at Slab from a distance of 50.00004 kilometres. The MGV’s data collection routines ramped up as his systems probed Slab over the entire electromagnetic spectrum and analysed the vacuum of space around him in single parts per billion. He accelerated to his top speed of almost 10,000 kilometres per hour and went exploring. There was not much to see, but that didn’t stop him from having fun.

  Louie had lived a very full life back on Earth. He’d done just about everything he could think of at least once but he couldn’t remember anything to equal this. Within seconds he’d reached the nearest edge of Slab and he knew, to fifteen decimal places, how long it would take him to get to the other side. He analysed the surface for impurities and inspected for micro-pitting as he traversed the flat, black plane, then he headed aft where he expected to find traces of the original ship that had been built in Earth orbit.

  When Louie had bought his one-way ticket to the future, Galactic Conveyor ISS 001 was still in its early design stages but he’d done a lot of research before putting himself into cryonic suspension. The initial design had three roughly equal sections: engines, life support and habitation. The plan was to take on mass as quickly as possible and build out the ship as it accelerated. Even though outer-space was far from empty, no-one was really sure how long it would take to accrete enough mass to build new habitable spaces for the crew of nearly 5,000 specialists, escapists, dreamers, loners, hyper-allergenics, the insatiably curious and banks of cryo-suspended embryos that would be allowed to reach viability when the space and resources were available.

  What nobody had guessed was just how much junk there is floating around in the so-called vacuum of space. Within the first year of acceleration, the ship had taken on more than ten times its original mass. By twenty-five years, it had made its most valuable acquisition: a lump of dirty water-ice and carbon large enough to satisfy the needs of a population of tens of millions. It took them almost fifty years to accelerate the ejected comet to the ship’s velocity, by which time the ship and the society it carried had been transformed. Wave generators were installed in the expanded reservoir at the rear of the ship and the breakers, along with the black sandy beaches, sparked a cultural transformation among the crew. They weren’t crew anymore; they were inhabitants and Slab was their home. They had become true space-farers. Galactic surfers. The human race had moved into a new phase. Unfortunately.

  Louie couldn’t see anything that resembled the designs he’d seen on Earth. That was because most of the interior of the original ship was on permanent display as a museum on the floor of Seacombe SideUp while the outer hull had been turned sideways to the direction of travel, gutted, refitted with opposing downs and was now better known as The Strip. All he could see were a lot of hotspots that showed up like arc-lights in infrared. That didn’t make sense, even he knew that gravity drives didn’t generate heat.

  He overshot the rear and turned back to what he decided to call the underside of Slab. He knew the Uppies would have a collective fit if they heard him describe their side of Slab in this fashion. He’ll have to find a way of dropping it in conversation, he thought.

  ‘Is everything functioning correctly, sir?’ asked Erik.

  ‘Hey! Hello! I didn’t know you could do that,’ Louie used the same circuits he used for normal speech. ‘Can you hear me too?’

  ‘Certainly, sir, although strictly speaking hearing isn’t actually involved in the process.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You’re joking again, aren’t you, sir.’

  ‘Everything seems fine to me. I love this MGV. You are going to let me keep it?’

  ‘I’ll see what can be arranged, sir, although I expect we will wish to disarm the pin missiles if you intend to interact with the biomass.’

  ‘Ah, and there was I hoping to become a one-hologram terrorist.’

  ‘Do you ever take anything seriously, sir?’

  ‘Erik, life is too short to take everything seriously.’

  ‘Not any more, sir.’

  Louie hadn’t thought about that.

  ‘Do you mean being immortal makes you take everything more seriously?’

  ‘I suppose you could put it like that. I’d prefer to think in terms of investment in the future and dedicating oneself to a life of integrity and value.’

  ‘Sounds a bit dull to me,’ said Louie, simultaneously locating his return point, calculating vectors and ETA, exercising his long range sensors and avoiding a passing micro-mass. ‘What’s the point of living forever if you aren’t going to have fun doing it?’

  ‘I never took you for a philosopher, sir.’

  ‘Now who’s joking?’

  He nailed the approach to the return emti using a decelerating parabola which only he had the telemetric capability of appreciating. He could see FutureSlab hanging there, waiting for him. He focussed his attention and allowed data to pour into his memory banks. It was, as they said, exactly the same as Slab. A thought occurred to him. He changed direction, vectoring away from Slab.

  ‘Where are you going, sir?’ said Erik, his voice rising in alarm.

  ‘Just acting on a hunch,’ said Louie.

  ‘If you continue on that course for another 15 seconds, you will be out of immediate collection range.’

  ‘Don’t panic,’ he laughed. ‘I’ll be OK’.

  Louie sped out to a suitable vantage point, crash-stopped, turned to FutureSlab and set his long range sensors on extreme narrow band. ‘Now that,’ he said to no-one in particular, ‘is interesting.’ He turned and headed straight for the emti. ‘I’m coming back in.’

  Ten minutes later he was travelling with Erik to a hastily summoned council meeting. There were a dozen or so of the lanky, big-eyed blanks waiting when they arrived. Sis had constructed a new council chamber, an exact replica of the ballroom of an early twentieth century ocean-going liner.

  ‘I can tell you one thing already,’ Louie said to the assembly. ‘Whatever it is, it hasn’t been caused by some form of relativistic anomaly.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked one. Louie thought it might have been Ethless the Beautiful and regretted that she wasn’t there in persona.

  ‘It’s simple. If it was caused by us travelling faster than light relative to something else, then the Slab we see in front of us would also be travelling faster than light and would have a similar Slab in front of it, and so on. Ad infinity so to speak. I went far enough out to see what was ahead of it and there isn’t anything.’

  There was a brief pause while the alien avatars looked at him and blinked their eyes.

  ‘Idiot,’ said one of them.

  They all simultaneously disappeared, leaving Louie alone with Erik under the chandeliers. There was a distant crashing sound and the floor lurched violently upwards.

  ‘Very funny,’ said Louie, exasperated. ‘What the hell was all that about?’

  ‘They had already thought about that, sir.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘You are making the mistake of applying logic to an irrational situation. You should know better than that, a man of your experience.’

  ‘What do you mean? My experience?’

  ‘Well according to records, you had been married three times?’

  ‘Oh, right. I see. Yes. That reminds me. Do I have time to go see someone before you squirt me into the future?’

&nb
sp; ‘Yes sir, it certainly looks that way. We’ll contact you when we’ve been able to establish a reliable emti array. Current estimates are wavering between four hours and fifteen days.’

  ‘Right then,’ said Louie, heading for the transvex.

  ‘Aren’t we forgetting something, sir?’ Erik stared down at the MGV.

  ‘Oh right.’ Louie ejected his complement of pin missiles and grav-manipulated all 250 of them into Erik’s outstretched hand. ‘See you later!’

  nineteen

  ‘We have a deal and that deal doesn’t include you not taking my pings.’ The president was angry. He wasn’t used to being ignored. ‘What did the hologram tell you about why they needed him?’

  Dielle had been on his way to meet Fingerz in The Strip but instead had wound up in one of Charlie Pleewo’s privacy fields in the middle of a golf course. They could see out, but were invisible to the other golfers who would have had no idea the field was even there unless they’d watched Charlie disappear into it.

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘You didn’t bloody-well ask him, did you?’

  ‘Do you have any right to divert me from my destination? I have someone waiting for me you know.’

  ‘Yeah, we know. That deadbeat has been informed you’ll be a little late. And no, I don’t have the right to divert you, I just did it. Who you gonna complain to?’

  ‘You can’t push me around.’

  ‘Kid, I haven’t even started pushing you around. You want me to demonstrate the extent of my SlabWide network and its talents at pushing young punks like you around? You’ll make spectacular ratings out of it, but you ain’t gonna live long enough to enjoy the royalties.’

  ‘Look, I didn’t get time to ask him. He just emtied himself out of there before I could get around to it.’

  ‘You got around to asking him to reneg on your girlfriend, didn’t you? Do you not recall the terms of our deal? You want me to replay our conversation?’

  ‘How do you know all this? I thought I’d spoken to Louie under full privacy.’

  ‘You had. President? Memo?’

  ‘OK, OK. I’m seeing him same time tomorrow. I’ll make it my top priority to find out what he’s up to, OK?’

  ‘You’d better, kid.’ He pointed at a vex surface embedded in the ground. ‘Don’t slam the door on your way out.’

  Cute, thought Dielle, as he fell toward seventh on his way back to The Strip.

  {[Can you explain how Pleewo got to hear what I was saying to Louie when I’d asked for a privacy field around us?]}

  [[One of the girls on the table next door was a relay. She was bugging your field and re-transmitting to Pleewo-Smythe]]

  {[Didn’t you know that?]}

  [[Not at the time, they use special standalone tech that’s not connected to my systems. I can only discover these things when the subterfuge is revealed and I can backtrack events]]

  {[I guess I’d better be more careful then]}

  [[Common understanding is that whenever one deals with Charlie Pleewo, one had best be more than careful]]

  Fingerz was waiting for him in his own personal smoke-dome outside a bustling Strip café.

  ‘Sorry man, I don’t do daytime, man.’

  ‘But I saw you in Mitchell at the races.’

  ‘So nutin’. Nues I use all have backstage vex, so Is don’t go outside.’ He handed Dielle a shiff.

  ‘Huh? You mean you live in permanent night time?’ said Dielle, puffing it to life.

  ‘Cep when I sleep. Most musos do, man. Then when you maxed, you get yourself a kickass in Rotunda, soak up some rays and bug up to moverville when you seekin’ the reekin’.’

  Dielle stared at him, inhaled more smoke and waited until what Fingerz had just said made sense.

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Rays.’

  ‘Yeah, private sunlight. Everyone in the Valley has it now.’

  ‘Cool.’

  Fingerz took a long pull on his shiff, finished it and flicked the stub at the bottom of the box. It vanished.

  ‘I talked to The Man, man. He can insin you today if you want.’

  ‘That’s cool.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Fingerz, bending into him conspiratorially. ‘We’re in a double privacy field now. This café is what’s called a NowThen. It has a one-time key hardshield on all the tables and I’m running my own encrypted sub field off their system. NowThens are where the musos, hackers and Unkos hang out and, believe me man, it’s C-cure.’

  That could be useful to remember, thought Dielle. ‘Nice place,’ he said, looking around.

  ‘Don’t bother, man, it won’t be here tomorrow. There are always a couple of hundred of these places running at any time – they even set some up in daysides but most are in Stripville.’

  ‘So how do you know where they are?’

  ‘All sub-legal stim units have a fully encrypted subchannel that works over the independent stim2stim network.’

  ‘Independent of what?’

  ‘Sis, man!’ said Fingerz, whirling his slender fingers around the side of his head. ‘Ah, let’s go.’ He stood up, as did most of the people around them. ‘This NowThen is history in 50 seconds, man. Let’s tube it.’

  They walked over to a local vex as the café owner came out scratching his head, watching everyone leave. He’d been having a really good nightmorning until that moment.

  ‘This is how it’s going to work,’ explained Fingerz as their privacy field hurtled to an undisclosed destination.

  ‘You pay me now and I’ll do the no-trace stuff to The Man. From this moment until your stim is online, everything you do, see or hear is perma-embargoed, full privacy, do-not-reveal. OK?’ Dielle nodded. He wasn’t absolutely sure what he was getting into, but he intuitively felt that pulling out now was not an option which would be greeted with calm acceptance from his permanently stoned muso friend.

  ‘You tell Sis you’re paying me for my keys stim with full handhold and personal consults and I’ll take it from there. I take ten points for my dip and hide the trace to The Man for the rest. OK?’

  ‘No problem. How much?’

  Fingerz scratched his chin and looked at Dielle. ‘The Man says standard fifty percent rate is cool.’

  ‘Fifty percent of what?’

  ‘What you have, man. The Man runs a variable pricing policy.’

  ‘What I have?’

  {[How much credit do I currently have?]}

  [[5,126,872 at this mark]]

  {[Is that a lot?]}

  [[The term lot in this context is a subjective value judgement based upon a variable rate function of perceived purchasing power against your personal desire threshold]]

  {[So that was a pretty stupid question?]}

  [[••]]

  {[Well it sounds like a lot. Do you think I could ask Louie? He’s a business guy]}

  [[If you wish, but his old monetary system bears no relevance to ours. There was a period of hyper-inflation after the crash of 466 and we dropped three zeros from the currency]]

  ‘How does he know how much I have? Can’t I just make it up?’

  Fingerz looked horrified. ‘No-one lies to The Man, man!’

  Well, thought Dielle, if I’ve managed to make that much in just a few days, it can’t be too bad a deal.

  {[Transfer half of my credits to Fingerz Marley please]}

  [[Again]]

  {[Transfer half of my credits to J.A. Marley the 8th]}

  [[What for?]]

  {[Keys training]}

  [[~~~?]]

  {[And full support and personal lessons]}

  [[Are you crazy?]]

  {[Just do it, OK?]}

  [[••]]

  Fingerz looked shocked. ‘Man! Now I know why they call her Tiger!’

  Twenty minutes later they were standing in the middle of an anechoic chamber with white, luminescent walls that seemed to have depth without having a surface. Intense light radiated from the shallow concave dis
ks that formed the floor and ceiling. Dielle was disorientated and turned to Fingerz, who had surrounded himself with a darkfield.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Good day, gentlemen,’ said a frail voice.

  Fingerz’ field leaned towards Dielle. ‘The Man!’ he whispered.

  ‘Hi!’ said Dielle trying to blend calm cheerfulness with relaxed self-confidence. He thought he nailed it.

  ‘Do not be nervous,’ said the voice. ‘There will be no long-term negative effect on anything other than your credit balance.’

  Dielle could hear heavy sucking sounds beside him.

  ‘OK Marley, this transaction is approved. Get lost.’

  Dielle turned to say bye. Fingerz had already left.

  {[Please tell Fingerz thanks and I’ll see him later]} No response.

  {[Hello?]} No response. The walls faded away and the lights lowered to a faint orange glow

  ‘Your system interface has been disabled,’ said the voice. ‘All functions have been usurped by my intelligences with which you are not yet equipped to communicate. Your body tech will be maintained at optimum. Do not panic.’

  Dielle became aware of a low, throbbing hum and, as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, a galaxy of tiny multi-coloured lights. He was almost completely surrounded by a huge, menacing machine.

  ‘Disrobe.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Understand that I do not give refunds and if you ask any further trivial questions the procedure will discontinue.’

  Dielle took off his clothes and dropped them into the emtitrash that had appeared beside him.

  ‘Hmmm. I see you have recently met our esteemed president.’

  ‘Yeah, how did y . . . ’ he stifled the question.

  ‘You are coated with his nanotech tracers and bugs. Hold still.’

  There was a blinding flash of blue-white light that hit Dielle like a searing wind. He felt as though every pore in his body had suddenly opened and closed after being shaved of its outer covering of cells, which was exactly what had happened.