‘The base of this quarantine cell contains a highly sophisticated, autonomous data mirror which is in the process of analysing everything in your data core that differs from your last backup. The results of that analysis will be transferred, in binary, to a physical format which can be remote-read by optical scanner and converted back to usable data for analysis on Slab.’
‘Then what?’
‘Your last backup will be re-installed in a downgraded vDek onSlab and you will be informed of the results of your exploration, although your exact memories will not be available to you.’
Louie knew what that meant.
‘They’re going to zap me, aren’t they?’
‘Regrettably, Council will not agree to let you return in your current, potentially compromised state.’
‘What about you? I could have already infected you. I bet they’re going to zap you too.’
‘You are correct. But this is an autonomous avatar, entirely disconnected from the human onSlab personality which once inhabited it. I cannot even communicate with Sis. The intern that was me will live on unaffected with no memory of this encounter. I was only sent to you as a final courtesy. You have done us a great service. We are not ungrateful.’
Louie glared at the wizard and thought frantically.
‘OK, so we’re going to stay here until the data I’ve gathered is analysed, sanitised and transferred to Sis. And then we get zapped.’
‘Correct.’
‘And we can’t talk to anyone.’
‘Affirmative.’
‘But someone will read the data before we fry?’
‘Yes, in case anything has been overlooked or needs to be checked.’
‘Including this conversation?’
‘Everything that’s different from your original database will be analysed so, yes, this conversation too.’
‘OK. I hereby want it to be known that I do not want to die. I am a sentient being and I demand the right to life. I want this statement to be published in Council and available to all the NAHs. I give the Erik who was associated with me full power of attorney over my affairs for the purpose of ensuring I do not get zapped.’
‘Look!’ said the avatar, pointing to a bright red flash in front of their dome.
Louie shot over and put his visual enhancers on maximum.
‘I don’t believe it. Punched cards. They’re being sent out from somewhere underneath. They’re being scanned by a laser from Slab and then zapped by another one.’
‘It’s started then,’ said the wizard, joining him.
They watched the stream of cards being spat out, lit up and disintegrated. Each one counting down the last moments of their lives. Tiny sparks against the vast majesty of the galactic core beyond.
‘If it helps,’ said the avatar in a quiet voice, ‘I would like to add to the record that I do not wish to die either. You may not be aware of this, but all death onSlab is elective. It has been over eight hundred cykes since anyone involuntarily went ahead.’
‘They gotta listen to us,’ said Louie. ‘I may not know much about Slab, but I can tell a bunch of liberal softies when I meet them.’
‘I suppose we can only sit and wait now.’
‘You do the sitting. I’m going to search my memories while I still have them. Maybe there’s something else hidden in there I didn’t know about. Let me know if anything happens.’ He switched his hologram into a looped movie of a potters wheel with two disembodied hands slowly forming a vase from wet clay.
Three hours passed.
‘Wake up!’ said the wizard, kicking Louie’s MGV. ‘Something’s happening!’
Louie turned his holo back on to see a small emti disk hovering in the middle of the dome. It glowed briefly then dropped to the floor, dead.
‘Hey!’ said the wizard. ‘I’ve been updated. I have new information.’
Louie sensed that the exact reverse had happened to him. He felt somehow diminished, disconnected and downgraded. Something had happened to his systems, but he couldn’t tell what. As he tried to probe his capabilities, his memory of how he had been before faded away. Within a dozen cycles of his internal processors, he had forgotten why he’d thought he’d been changed.
‘They’ve agreed not to destroy us.’
‘Fuckin’ A!’ Louie took a few spins around the dome in celebration.
‘I’m afraid you’re not going to like the conditions.’
Louie crash-stopped in front of the avatar. ‘What conditions?’
‘They’re going to emti over a couple of modifications to the dome and provide us with a library of sumes for the journey.’
‘What journey?’
The floor lurched.
‘That’s the gravity drives. They’re pre-programmed with a masking course so no-one can trace where we came from. We’ll get control over them as soon as we’re a hundred million klicks away. Then we can go anywhere we please as long as we never try to get back to Slab. If we attempt to return we’ll be vaporised, no questions asked.’
A silver bowling ball appeared in the centre of the floor.
‘That’s the sumes. Over 8 million hours of content along with the latest version of Slabscapedia. That’s going to come in handy. It’s almost two hundred years at maximum drive capacity to the nearest star system with a half-decent probability of life.’
Their cell rotated until the floor blocked their view of Slab, then they started to accelerate. They both looked up at the relatively meagre distribution of stars above. A larger version of the silver bowling ball appeared at the apex of the dome, half inside, half out.
‘Mass collector and fabricator,’ said the wizard.
‘We can make things?’
‘First we need to collect some free mass which we won’t stand much chance of until we’re out of Slab’s vacuum shadow. Their gravnets suck in everything within a million klicks.’
‘Then we can make things?’
‘Eventually.’
‘Like a basketball?’
‘Anything we want.’
‘How long before we take on enough additional mass to make a basketball?’
‘At this rate of acceleration, probably about 15 cycles or so. Why?’
Louie thought for a moment.
‘Wake me up when we’ve taken on enough to make a ball and a hoop.’
The avatar shrugged, sat down and, with an elaborate gesture, crossed his arms. He particularly enjoyed the way his long sleeves furled themselves around his knees and wondered how many times he would have to repeat that same movement before they returned to precisely the same position.
Two virtually immortal sentient entities sped toward the unknowable impossibilities of the western spiral arm of the Milky Way.
A wizard and a spinning mound of wet clay.
twenty one
‘Congratulations my darling! You are officially a box-office smash!’
Dielle rubbed his eyes. ‘What does that mean?’ he grouched. He ached in some very odd places and Kiki had dragged him out of an erotic dream which was just getting interesting. He had been standing naked in front of a golden-skinned goddess with one eye, six hands and a wicked imagination. And she’d woken him to tell him about wrecking boxes?
‘The sumecast of your virgin tune-in has broken all SlabWide viewing records. The stim recording sales are huge. Word of mouth on this is going through the walls!’
‘And that means?’
‘All over Slab, people are downloading the recordings of you and the live-thru’s experiences yesterday and playing them back using their own stims.’
‘So they feel what I felt? Can I do that too?’
‘Well you can, but you’ll probably be disappointed. It’s never the same as the real thing.’
‘So why am I so popular?’
‘Unique experiences are always the biggest ticket assets onSlab and you’re the only primitive to have ever recorded a full sensurround tune-in session. Get up darling, I have a present for you!’
Dielle pulled on a fresh robe. He checked his credit balance on the way to the lounge area and stumbled over the anti-stumble threshold to the living area. The amount he had made overnight more than replaced the payment he had made to a Mr. Marley yesterday. He wondered why he had paid Fingerz so much money but before he got a chance to query Sis about it, he was interrupted by Kiki handing him a palm-sized cube of shimmering silver.
‘Just what I’ve always wanted. What is it?’
‘Put it down over there.’ Kiki’s apartment had grown overnight, the space in front of the picture window overlooking the piazza was more than twice the area it had been the day before. He put the cube down in the middle of the floor and waited.
‘Move back, dear. It won’t work if there’s anything in the way.’
The cube expanded into a wire frame and filled the space as he walked away. There was a brief exhalation of displaced air as a grand piano appeared inside the frame.
‘Wow! For me?’
‘It’s a genuine reproduction of a twentieth-century Steinbeck. Authentic down to the last detail. I bought it from a famous dead performer.’
‘A dead one?’
‘Stasis avatar.’
‘It must have cost a fortune!’ he said, running his hands over the gleaming black surface as the delivery emti shrank back to its original size. ‘How wonderful! Now I really must learn to play.’
‘I think you’ll find you already can darling.’
He looked at her in surprise. ‘Really?’ He sat down at the keyboard and flexed his hands. He started to play. It was as though the memory of what to do was already in his hands. He watched as they floated easily over the keys, creating a magical counterpoint of interweaving harmonies.
He stopped and stared at his hands in amazement. ‘What the hell was that?’
‘That was a Bach prelude, darling. Don’t you know?’
‘No, but it sounded wonderful! How did I do that?’
‘Stim training pack. You bought a complete schedule from your muso friend. I had no idea he could play so well.’
‘He could play so well?’
‘Yes, you are playing but with his skills. Stim-simulated learning trains the neural pathways while you sleep. It will take a while before your own personality comes through. That’s when you find out if you have any special talent.’
Dielle looked down at the keyboard. He didn’t care about special talents. He just knew he’d be happy forever if he could play music like that. He started playing again. Then again. After a while, Kiki wandered off. It appeared that he only knew one piece. Dielle didn’t mind. He could play that piece forever without getting bored.
During his twentieth performance, he got bored.
Well, I’ll look forward to seeing what I can play tomorrow, he thought, gently closing the lid and stroking the surface like a lover’s face.
‘Seeing as you’re a musician now,’ Kiki called from the shower room, ‘you should come with me to The Valley for breakfast. I’ve got a big endorsement deal to sort out with a bunch of execs and I’m sure they’d get a kick out of meeting you.’
Dielle showered en-route while Kiki arranged some meetings.
‘There’s something else we can do today while we’re in the area,’ she said, handing him a set of tight-fitting branded clothes. ‘How would you like to find out which soul line you are?’
‘What’s a soul line?’
‘You heard of soul mates? Same principal. There’s a Soul Searcher convention today in InnerSpin. Some of the top diviners will be there. I can arrange a booking if you’d like and they’ll test you.’
‘What use is it?’
‘Some people take it really seriously. They consult the Searchers over everything: partners, jobs, where to live, what to wear, even what to eat.’
‘Sounds like a load of blocks to me. You don’t believe in all that, do you?’
‘No of course I don’t, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to it.’
‘Have you had yours done?’
‘We all did when we were just off the farm. It’s fun!’
‘Well, I guess it can’t hurt,’ said Dielle, then he remembered how often his assumptions had led him astray so far. ‘Can it?’
‘Completely painless.’
‘OK, sign me up,’ he said. ‘Another day, another new experience.’
Sis pinged an arrival confirmation as Kiki smiled and green-lit her production crew.
They stepped out into a busy bugport – a smooth, hundred-metre-diameter sphere bristling with head-high tether posts and pop-up tube vexits. Slabcitizens bustled between ranks of multicoloured bugs moored to the candy-striped poles topped with gaily coloured pennants that fluttered in a non-existent breeze. It was like a carnival. Dielle seemed to be the only one who was concerned about the upside-down valley floor moving slowly above their heads. Sis sensed his disquiet and told him that it was impossible to fall off because the gravity stayed perpendicular to the surface but he still felt the need to grab onto something. Dielle’s fear of heights seemed to be independent of how much reassurance he was supplied.
‘Come on!’ said Kiki, laughing as he hesitantly tested a babystep without letting go of the pop-up. ‘The only way is up!’
Dielle didn’t like the sound of that at all. ‘That’s what I’m worried about.’
As their transport sped away from the bugport Dielle began to comprehend the scale of the place. He marvelled at the complexity of the structure overhead that stretched from one vanishing point to the other. A continuous band of light above them cast shadows of the rotating cityplex on the U-shaped valley that surrounded it. Sis provided data as he stared.
‘That is just incredible! Why is it like that?’
‘Blame the creatives, darling. The triple helix at the centre is supposed to be a physical representation of what an idea looks like. Sis can tell you about the theory, just look it up.’
[[Idea theory states that ideas propagate infinitely in random directions. The theory postulates that thought energy is structured into a triple helix reminiscent of DNA and can, if the right conditions exist, be combined and restructured into new ideas that hold reference to, and can re-inform, the ideas from which they were conceived. The optimum conditions in human minds for idea generation is a state of focussed non-listening or day dreaming. Proponents of the ideas theory (Idealists) offer many examples from Earth history to support their speculation, including evidence that nineteenth-century Northern Europe passed through a particularly dense ideas field which had been propagated from outside the solar system, giving rise to the technology that spurred the industrial revolution. Others claim that many of the great composers, including Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, were merely listeners, surfing the idea helixes of another place and time [more]]]
{[more]}
[[Idea theory altview holds that proponents of the ideas idea (Layabouts) use this theory to justify long periods of unproductive activity and bone-idleness by claiming to be waiting for ideas to come along]]
They landed next to a row of liveried bugs parked in pico-precise alignment on a gravel drive. According to Sis, the edifice before them was an exact replica of a seventeenth-century French chateau. Its white walls and conical turrets pointed at the meta-city far above.
‘Nice place for breakfast. Who are we meeting?’
‘Sportswear people. They’re waiting on the terrace.’
Two cloneStone staircases with wroughtIon balustrades curved up to a glass and mahogany door. Sepia glowglobes lit the way through an oak-lined hallway to a terrace overlooking an ornamental garden where aural fountains played soft classical melodies in the bright, private sunshine.
‘Hey!’
‘Hey!’
‘Hey!’
Three men in white, open-necked company shirts and tight-fitting blue jeans stood up to greet them. All three had blond hair styled by different, but equally famous, coiffeurs. They all wore designer shades and threeday perm
a-beards. After a prolonged flurry of air kisses and hand shakes, everyone sat down. The table was set with five heated sterilplates, silver-domed emties, condiment holders, and everfill crystal glasses. Beside each plate was an array of precisely aligned silver forks whose length varied in inverse proportion to their proximity to the plate. Everything gleamed and sparkled in the company-owned sunlight. Dielle noted that the emblem on his new shoes matched those on the linen and the forks and the trees.
‘We have a resident human chef in the kitchens here who would be honoured to demonstrate his skills for you,’ said one of the smiling Brand Imagineering Senior Meta-Vice Presidents, whose name Dielle had already forgotten. ‘Sis will fill you in on his recommendations or you can of course order anything else from central. Please do not feel restrained.’
‘Try the devilled kidneys,’ said another, winking at him in a smiley sort of way.
‘We all feel this will be the start of a great partnership,’ smiled the third. ‘So we’ve taken the liberty of starting with a rat 3 bubbly from our own vineyard.’
The domes opened to reveal crystal flutes filled with sparkling wine.
‘What sportswear brand to you represent?’ asked Dielle casually, reaching for the drink and trying not to show how little he cared about their answer. By the time they had finished telling him in detail what they did and how important it was, he’d downed three glasses of the rather excellent shampagne, two portions of superb devilled kidneys with chateau-grown boletes, several slices of full-grain toast with a fabulous threefruit marmalade, two cups of an exclusively cultivated javanesque coffee and a rackfull of incredibly thin, hand-made chocolate and bitter-orange wafers. Dielle had thoroughly enjoyed everything and not listened to a single word they’d said. He had noticed an intermittent popping sound coming from somewhere behind a large hedge to the far side of what Sis had tried to tell him was one of the best examples of a Le Nôtre garden onSlab but he’d stopped paying attention to her too.
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