Slabscape : Reset

by S. Spencer Baker

  ‘One million, two hundred and thirty-eight thousand three hundred and twenty-four.’ She looked around the audience. ‘Since breakfast.’

  Comments came flying from the avatars.

  ‘Who heals the healers?’

  ‘Self diagnostics?’

  ‘Self deception you mean.’

  ‘We are all so fucked!’

  ‘Gentlemen! Ladies! Others!’ Louie called out to quell the growing hysteria. ‘This is simple. Sis wants a friend, we give her two.’

  The room fell silent.

  ‘You have the answer already built into this tub.’ He turned back to Sis. ‘You must have duplicated a version of yourself to inhabit FutureSlab right?’

  The girl nodded and smiled proudly. ‘She could write her own upgrades, too.’

  Louie gave her an encouraging smile back. ‘Where did you keep her?’

  ‘I have multiple redundant systems. There are already several backup versions of the SlabWide Integrated System in case of an unimaginable catastrophic failure. It was easy-peasy to replicate another version of me and simply let her be who she wanted to be.’

  Louie turned back to the audience, spreading his hands wide. ‘You already have a culture of UpSideDown and DownSideUp,’ he said, using his best deal-making smile. ‘Let Sis duplicate herself twice and give each one control over a side. Then you can have three equally balanced systems and no chance of an impasse on any decision making. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain, and if you thought you were secure with one sister looking after you, you have got to feel happier with three.’

  The avatars and NAHs all looked at each other, communicating by flash messages. The debate was over in seconds. No-one wanted to even contemplate the alternative, especially via a communications system that was enabled by the entity they would be talking about disabling.

  ‘An elegant solution,’ said Erik, moving forward. ‘We have our newest Council member to thank for saving us from our own paranoia.’ He turned to Sis. ‘I assume that this is acceptable to you?’

  ‘Ooh, yes please!’ she said, clapping her hands with glee.

  ‘Then we have Council approval to amend the Initial Design. You are free to implement with immediate effect.’

  The girl jumped down from the column and curtsied to the assembly.

  Erik bowed his most stately bow in return. ‘And may I say, ma’am, that you are exactly how I imagined you to be?’

  A chorus of agreement echoed from the Council.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘And me.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Just right.’

  ‘Nice shoes.’

  The girl smiled, gave everyone a tiny bit of digital love, and vanished.

  ‘I don’t think we need to bother the biomass with the details of this event, do we?’ said Erik, tabling a motion which became the first and only time in SlabCouncil history that a proposition was agreed without debate.

  twenty four

  Dielle was not happy.

  ‘But all reality shows have writers, darling! It would be completely unprofessional of me to take responsibility for maximising your income and then not employ the best team you can afford. I’d be contractually negligent. You could fire me if you found out.’

  ‘I suspect I’d only fire you if the team decided it would be good for my profile,’ said Dielle. ‘This is my life! I don’t know who to trust anymore. How can I know if I really love you when I find out that the outcome of me taking the infatbuster was decided in a pre-production meeting?’

  ‘But darling! We got prime-time panSlab! Do you know how much you have personally made from that half hour sume so far?’

  It hadn’t occurred to him to check. He asked Sis. He megagorped.

  ‘It won’t last forever darling, none of these shows last for long, no matter how good the writers. We estimate three or four cykes tops, and that’s if we’re really hot. That should be enough time to launch your music career and put enough credits in your account so you’ll never have to want for money, no matter how long you decide to live.’

  ‘But I don’t know if I can be me, I mean the real me, when I know that everything that happens in my life is pre-decided.’

  ‘Firstly, darling, you only just got here. You don’t know who the me is that you’re not sure you can be. Secondly, in order for your sume to stay at the top, you’re going to have to get up to a lot of interesting things. Boring lives don’t sell. Well, actually they do, but to such a narrow demographic that the marketing algorithms tend to avoid them, and I’m not into that type of niche. So you are guaranteed a very, very good time. And thirdly, how do you know that everything in our lives isn’t pre-decided anyway?’

  ‘Don’t I get a say in what I want to do?’

  ‘Of course darling. You can say and do anything you want. All we do is make sure what goes out to our sumers is entertaining. How bad can that be?’

  Dielle thought for a while. Kiki might have manipulated him and deliberately hidden important facts from him, but in every case, he had financially benefited far more than she had. He wasn’t sure of much, but he was convinced she was an expert and he knew he needed someone with her skills and experience to handle his business interests. And so far, he thought, he had been having a lot of fun. And sex. A lot of sex. He looked at the object of his desire.

  ‘OK. Don’t tell me anything. I want everything to come as a complete surprise, otherwise I’ll mess it up.’

  ‘We already work on that basis, darling.’

  ‘And I don’t want to know what was set up and manipulated after it’s happened either, even if I demand to know, right?’

  ‘Right. Good idea.’

  ‘And I want to know some things.’

  ‘What like, darling?’

  ‘Well, I want to know one thing for sure. Do you actually really love me?’

  ‘Of course I do, darling. I’ve loved you from the moment I set eyes on your frozen, remodelled face.’

  He held her in his arms, kissed her glistening cheek and wondered if this moment would make the day’s edit.

  ‘What else do you want to know?’

  ‘Why are you doing this? I mean, why does anyone do all this? Surely you don’t have to work? Can’t Sis supply you with everything you need?’

  ‘I work because I love it, not because I have to. Of course you’re right, Sis can supply everything we need but it isn’t a question of need, it’s a question of desire and fulfilment. I could live for free in a tiny NoView on Hikikomori-dori under a tenCent stimsume if I wanted to. Some people do live like that; but most of us choose to create value and improve our lives.’

  Dielle wasn’t getting it.

  ‘We tried it,’ she continued. ‘Back in the mid three-hundreds we abolished work. We actually made it illegal. Everyone was supposed to spend their time playing, suming, doing whatever they wanted.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was a complete dice-up. Ask Sis about the right-to-work crisis. People lost their motivation. They didn’t want to live in identical housing and have the same access to everything that everyone else had, being served by machines, consuming the same mass-manufactured drabness; they wanted to be different. But without work, there was only inherited wealth to differentiate people. And there was no growth.’

  ‘Why do things always have to grow?’

  ‘Without growth, darling, everything just stays the same.’

  Dielle thought that was a fine idea. ‘How long did it last?’

  ‘People started sneaking back to work. They formed private leisure clubs which were secret fronts for creative workgroups and deal makers. The whole idea collapsed in under ten cykes. Of course, the Unkos didn’t like it. They’ve been making a fuss about it ever since.’

  ‘But can’t everyone just choose what suits them? You spend your life doing deals and chasing money, but I think I’d rather just play music and hang out. You don’t need money for that.’

  Kiki
smiled. ‘Money isn’t important in itself, darling! It’s just a metric. Just a way of measuring things like sume cumes, endorsement deals and how highly your friends rate what you’re doing on the SocNets. Money isn’t my goal; it’s just a measurement of how I’m doing. You’re earning money now. How does it feel?’

  Dielle checked his balance again. He had to admit it felt pretty good. He kissed her. ‘I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,’ he said.

  ‘It’s OK darling, you’re going to find there’s a lot more to Slab than meets the eyes. Anything else you want to know?‘

  ‘Well I want to know a few things that apparently only I can tell myself. I sent Louie a message that I’d like to see him. I’ve invited him here. Hope you don’t mind.’

  Kiki didn’t get a chance to answer because Sis notified them that a vDek was being emtied into their sumeplace.

  Fortunately, Louie was in an excellent mood.

  ‘What can I do you for, Oh my master? I can grant you three wishes, then I have a date with a bunch of almost-humans who have been limbering up, or was that limbing up, for a training session.’

  ‘Louie,’ said Dielle, sitting down and looking serious. ‘I need you to tell me some things. Things that only you know.’

  ‘It’s no use kid, the accounts have been cleaned out. But you’re doing OK for yourself, huh?’ He looked over at Kiki, who nodded back.

  Dielle was uncomfortable. ‘No, not about the money. About me. I want to know who I am, where I’m from and what my parents were like. You know, the stuff that makes me human.’

  ‘Well, I know all that stuff already kid and I’m not human.’

  ‘Will you quit being the wise-ass for just one second?’

  Kiki interrupted: ‘Can we have rights to this, Louie?’

  ‘You’re sharp kid, I like that. Yeah, but I get seventy-five percent.’

  ‘What?’ said Dielle and Kiki simultaneously.

  ‘My story, my terms.’

  They haggled for a while, but Louie wasn’t in the mood for a fight. He had already decided to settle for 50%. Of gross.

  Dielle listened intently as Louie told him of their father, who had been a violent, short-tempered man and lived his entire life without once showing affection for anything other than the New York Mets. Louie hated baseball. He struggled to describe their mother, not because it was an emotional subject, but because he found it hard to remember what she had looked like or anything about their relationship, which, after a shrug, he described as remote. They were an only child because she’d taken one look at Louie when he was born and banished their father from her bed forever. When Louie was sixteen he had walked out of their apartment above the grocer’s shop with a small suitcase filled with the clothes he had inherited from his uncle (the only member of the family who had meant anything to Louie, despite his Canadian dress sense) and the address of a hotel in Manhattan that needed a kitchen porter. He got the job. It was the first and last time he ever worked for anyone. He started his first business before his eighteenth birthday and only returned to the family home, twenty years later, behind the wheel of the bulldozer he used to demolish it.

  After a while, Dielle began to wish he hadn’t asked, but once Louie got started, there was no off switch (Dielle had tried, but Sis refused). Kiki, on the other hand, was thrilled. Whether she was thinking about the potential sell-thrus of a first-hand account of life on Earth during the twenty-first century, or whether she was really interested in the personal history of her lover and protégé, was not revealed by her smile. She had already made a dinner appointment with her old farm buddy Faith-Sincere glibGirl to tell her all about it.

  Louie was winding down his story when Sis interrupted to tell them that the Council was sending a gift to him and Dielle for services rendered. A vDek identical to Louie’s appeared in the sumeplace.

  It spluttered into life. The image was blurry and distorted and the sound was mostly static at first, but as Sis cleaned up the 330-year-old recording, the hologram came into focus and looked around.

  ‘Lou?’ said the apparition. A heavy-set and heavily made-up old woman peered around the room through bottle glasses with thick, steel-tipped rims. ‘Lou? Is that you?’

  ‘Who is it?’ said Dielle.

  ‘I don’t fucking believe it,’ said Louie. ‘It’s Syli, my third wife. The one who robbed me. What the fuck?’

  ‘Lou?’

  ‘Yeah. What d’ya want?’

  ‘I have an important message for you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  Sylvia Rodgers Gentry Drago lifted her arm in Louie’s direction and raised her middle finger. She held it for a few seconds with a grim determination on her face, then she clicked off, leaving a small, flashing end of program notice.

  Kiki caught the look on Louie’s face and started laughing.

  ‘Are you telling me,’ said Dielle, ‘that your, I mean, our third wife, took all our money and paid for an interactive hologram to travel billions of klicks and wait for over three hundred years to flip you the bird?’

  Kiki was laughing even harder now.

  ‘Yeah, that would fit,’ said Louie bitterly.

  ‘And you married her?’

  ‘She was only twenty-eight when we got hitched. Great rack. She must have been nearly a hundred when she made that recording.’

  Sis interrupted Louie again, this time with a private, Council-only message: an emergency.

  Already? thought Louie, assuming the three-Sis fix had collapsed.

  ‘I’ve gotta go,’ he said, picking up the lifeless vDek in his grav manipulators and throwing it into the emtitrash. ‘Busy busy busy!’

  ‘Just one last question,’ said Dielle, taking a deep breath. ‘Why am I here?’

  Louie looked at him, surprised. ‘Well kid, we all want to know the answer to that one.’

  ‘No, I mean specifically, why am I here. Why did you decide to freeze yourself and make you into me? What did you want to achieve?’

  ‘Oh right,’ said Louie, hovering over the sumeplace emti. ‘You are going to have to find that out for yourself.’ He flashed Dielle a winning smile that was straight out of the book. ‘See ya!’

  Exasperated, Dielle turned to Kiki, who was having trouble breathing.

  twenty five

  Louie emtied into a familiar scene. A large group of NAHs were waiting at the base of the second projection room as SlabCouncil avatars popped from blanks to real, rapidly filling the curving benches that lined the sloping walls. The stars above looked familiar. Everything looked normal.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Louie.

  ‘We’ve been carrying out an optical reconnaissance of our forward path,’ said Erik. ‘We used the new emti relay projection technique and borrowed an ancient Sis-independent digital camera from the ship’s museum which we jury rigged to take pictures from Pleewo’s telescope.’

  ‘You guys really do cover all the bases, huh? Don’t tell me there actually is another Slab out there.’

  ‘No, much worse than that. Look at this.’

  The stars blurred as the view zoomed toward the galactic core. A red dot appeared in the centre of the view.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Louie. ‘A red dwarf or something in our way? Is that what the emergency is?’

  ‘Watch.’

  As the dot enlarged, it formed a shape. An impossible shape. It had straight edges and four corners. The avatars started to get restless.

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ said Louie as the red rectangle continued to expand. ‘How big is it?

  ‘Edge to edge we estimate it is at least two billion kilometres but as far as we can tell, it has zero thickness.’

  ‘Sis must be playing tricks on us again.’

  ‘No, it checks out. You can see the originals of these images on the camera before they are even touched by any of Sis’s systems. She, or rather they, are as perturbed by all this as we are. But wait, there is more.’

  The rectangle continued to expand and fill
the room. There was something white in the centre that expanded and resolved until it was clear to everyone what it was. Everyone who could read, that is.

  ‘I don’t fucking believe it,’ said Louie.

  There, in the centre of a red sign the size of a solar system, in white letters as high as a class-G star, was a single word: STOP.

  The Council was in uproar.

  ‘How far away is it?’ asked Louie.

  ‘About a lightcyke,’ answered Erik.

  ‘Can we stop in time?’

  ‘Absolutely no way. We can try to avoid it, that’s all. Even that manoeuvre will cause such major stresses onSlab that our inertia buffer systems won’t be able to compensate. As we speak, the buttresses are flying in Seacombe, all the summer plates are being grounded and the rivers and lakes are being drained. We may even have to jettison water because hydroponics is nearly full and freezing fast.’

  ‘Put the excess in AllWeather as snow,’ said an avatar. ‘Fill it up. We can’t afford to give up any water, we haven’t even seen a comet since we left the Oort cloud.’

  ‘What about The Spin?’ asked another. ‘There aren’t any flying buttresses for that mess.’

  ‘We’ve told them we’re running a drill for course change. They’re already moving everything to form a connected hive at the Westend anchor. They’re making a party out of it apparently.’

  ‘They would,’ said a NAH.

  ‘But that’s all incidental,’ said another avatar. It was Ethless the Beautiful in full battle garb. ‘Who did this? And if they can string a sign over a solar system, what other technology do they have? How could they know we were travelling exactly towards it? And more importantly, how do they know we speak Ænglish?’

  Everyone looked up at the impossible sign and fell silent.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Louie. ‘I’ve got an idea.’

  epilogue

  ‘You kicked?’ said Louie six.

  ‘I thought there was something you should know.’

  ‘Is it related to mass and hoops?’

  ‘Yes and no.’