Slabscape : Reset Read online

  Contents

  Title page

  Copyright

  Author note

  Dedication

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty one

  twenty two

  twenty three

  twenty four

  twenty five

  epilogue

  more

  Notes

  SLABSCAPE: RESET

  S.Spencer Baker

  Blip Books

  Kindle edition (webback version)

  First published in the UK in 2010 by Blip Books.

  Copyright © 2010 S.Spencer Baker.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters in this book and elsewhere published under the Slabscape name are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No substantial part of this work may be reproduced in any manner without the permission of the publisher. The use of brief excerpts for the purpose of critical review is considered ‘fair use’ and encouraged.

  ISBN 978-0-9567387-1-4

  Edited by Nick Coldicott.

  www.BlipBooks.com

  From paperback to webback.

  The slabscape is littered with ideas, words and technologies that haven’t been invented yet1. Some of these need a little explaining2.

  I loathe footnotes3. Every time I turn the page and see a footnote, that’s the first thing I read. Glossaries are even worse; all that page turning and place losing - it dices your head.

  www.slabscapedia.com acts as a backup to the slabscape series and was originally intended to be a repository for explanations, back-stories and definitions. Unfortunately, it’s got a bit out of hand.

  SSB, Tokyo, September 2010

  Addendum to webback edition for Kindle.

  The quality of the webback reading experience is dependent on how well the eBook reader’s webbrowser is integrated and, obviously, whether the eReader is connected to the internet.4 Since Slabscape: Reset was first published, upgrades to the Kindle browser’s functionality have made it worthwhile embedding weblinks to the slabscapedia in the text. This should mean that the Kindle reading experience can match that of the ePub format on other platforms. It’s not perfect yet, but this is a relatively new technology and I’m hoping we can have more fun with it as it evolves.

  As an added bonus, this version doesn’t have the typos that were in the first edition. ‘There was even a ‘your’ instead of ‘you’re’ - for Dicesake!

  SSB, Tokyo, September 2014

  for S.

  one

  He was falling.

  For a long, long time, this was the only thing he knew.

  two

  three

  There was no wind against his face, no sound of rushing air and no clue from the featureless white fog that surrounded him.

  Still, he knew he was falling. With accelerating certainty, he knew he was getting ever closer to something. Closer to something unknown and further away from something comfortable and safe.

  Reference points. Reference points. He needed something to latch on to. Where was he falling from?

  He thought back.

  There was no back.

  OK, OK, he thought. How about: Who am I? That should be easy enough.

  Nothing.

  Not even a hint. A blank surrounded by a void.

  All he knew was that he was falling.

  He felt sick.

  Now he knew two things: he was falling and he felt sick.

  Oh well, he thought, I suppose that’s progress.

  four

  Falling. White. Sick.

  Something was niggling him. A thought was scratching around in the back of his head.

  His subconscious was trying to force some key detail into his conscious mind. It seemed important. He tried to focus and squeeze the message out. It was like trying to remember someone’s name and just as the word was about to form . . . forgetting it again. He hated it when that happened. It was a kind of mental stuttering that stopped him from remembering. Stopped him from . . .

  Stopping was something to do with . . .

  Oh shit!

  Falling was a finite process. He was going to have to stop falling at some point. Maybe soon. Something told him that stopping falling might not be the type of experience that a non-falling person would volunteer for. Then he was sure of it. He was not going to want to stop falling anywhere around here anytime soon.

  No.

  No way.

  He screamed.

  No sound. Or maybe he was making a sound but couldn’t hear it. He felt like he was screaming. He tried to reason with himself but that didn’t help so he abandoned reason and became mindlessly lost in fear and panic. Then he gnawed desperately at reality by trying to make himself believe he wasn’t really experiencing any of this and it was all a dream. If it was a dream, then he couldn’t be in any real danger. Or if he really was in danger, it was probably nothing to do with his dream and he couldn’t even know about it because if he was dreaming, he must be asleep or maybe he really was in danger but as he was asleep, he couldn’t do anything about it anyway so he might as well stop freaking out and calm down.

  Just like that, he calmed down.

  He re-evaluated his circumstances.

  No significant change.

  White blur, still falling, feeling sick (although that seemed to be fading). Maybe his mind had been playing tricks on him. Maybe falling was a natural state for someone like him. Not that he knew what that was or if there was anyone but him in the realm of existence. So far, all the evidence available to him suggested that he was alone.

  For ever.

  Maybe, he thought, I’ll just have to get used to it.

  He slammed into the ground.

  five

  His body convulsed in the recovery frame.

  ‘. . . and we have re-entry. Mark inception.’

  He gasped for breath and realised, as he felt the air rush into his raw lungs, that he hadn’t been breathing until that exact moment. Funny that he hadn’t noticed it before. He must be dead of course, because no-one could have survived an impact like that. But then if he was dead he wouldn’t be gulping in air for dear life. And someone had said something about re-entry. He’d entered something. Again. And in the process he had screwed up, crashed horribly and destroyed his body. Odd thing though: He felt no pain. No physical pain that is – his mind was turning itself inside out.

  A soft gauze was taken from his eyes. He tried to focus on the vague blur in front of him. It was a face. It moved. It was the face of a strange and wonderful being, with wide, crystal-clear eyes.

  As he gazed, breathless, into what he knew was the face of the most beautiful woman he had seen in his entire thirty-second life, her full lips parted slightly and she too, took a brief intake of breath. Her gorgeous, dark eyes focussed fractionally and captured the moment. Then she smiled and he was falling again.

  Her face was surrounded by a white, helmet-like cap. She reached up with white-gloved hands to remove something warm and comfortable from the side of his head and expose him to the larger sounds of the white, featureless room.

  ‘Hello, can you hear me?’

  ‘Uuuhhhhhhgghhh.’

  ‘Good. Now,
can you understand what I’m saying to you?’

  ‘Wehramhaigh’

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘Where . . . am . . . I?’

  ‘Oh good. You can speak. Excellent. Well done! That will save us a lot of work!’

  ‘Of course I can speak, I’m . . . er . . .’ He still had no memory of anything before the fall, and even that was fading out like a dream. What was fading in was a profound sense of irritation.

  ‘What the hell has just happened to me?’ he demanded. ‘Where the hell am I? Who am I? And who the . . . are you?’

  Waking from a long period of zerosleep has been described as rather like having your toes sucked – through your ears. His facial muscles contracted around his perfectly formed nose.

  ‘Yes, I was warned you might be a tiny bit tetchy. Never mind; apparently it’s quite normal.’ She smiled winningly. ‘OK. First off, you are in a re-familiarisation ward of the cryonic suspension unit in the Vincent Van Cloud biological repair centre, Seacombe SideUp. You are a reset and because you are a reset, you don’t have a name yet, dear, just a numerical signifier. I’ve been calling you Dielle because you were stored in Level Three, Row D, Column L. See? D, L: Dielle. I thought it was clever.’

  Patient facial response; imperceptible.

  ‘You can choose your own name before you leave if you like.’ She was disappointed. She’d been using the name while he’d been thawing out and had grown fond of it. ‘I am Nurse Kioki Sypher-Marie Pundechan and I’m in charge of your rehabilitation training. You can call me Kiki.’

  She was focussing her attention on something behind his head that he couldn’t turn to see. He couldn’t move anything else either. Every part of him seemed to be rigid.

  ‘Why can’t I move? What’s wrong with me? Am I a prisoner?’

  ‘A what? No! Of course not!’ She looked horrified. ‘You can’t move because, even though your muscles have been artificially stimulated to keep them viable, they haven’t actually been doing anything useful for a very long time. Also, the terms of your regen contract stipulated that you were to be a lot taller than you were before, which means you are going to have to re-learn how to do basic things like walk and feed yourself and so on. To help you do that, you are connected to an automated external skeleton which will control your limbs and balance your body while you practise moving around. You’ll like it, it’s very strong.’

  Dielle started to feel his mind reeling again. This was just a bit too much for someone who had only just been born.

  ‘Uh, how long have I been in this place?’

  ‘Well, you are a reset which means that you have only been here for about ten minutes. Today is your birthday – type of. Happy birthday dear.’

  ‘But you said my muscles hadn’t been used for a long time. How long?’ At this point he wasn’t really interested in the niceties of resetiquette, he was desperate for some bottom line facts to anchor into some hard-core reality.

  ‘Well, let’s see . . .’ She did something with the panel behind his head. ‘You were in regen for just over three hundred and twenty-five body years. We can’t regenerate bodies in real time, it takes over six years in regen to get a year younger, you see?’

  ‘I’ve been here three hundred and twenty-five years? Nurse . . . how old am I?’

  ‘Oh, you have the body of a perfectly healthy twenty-seven-year-old male. Rather a nice one too, I think you’ll find. We’ve made quite a few improvements during the regen. All as per contract – except for one thing which unfortunately hasn’t become possible, but there you go, no-one could have predicted we wouldn’t have solved that one in a kilocyke. Lookadat! Anyway, RegenInc disclaims all liability as per the technology-not-yet-invented waiver. Hang on.’

  Kiki’s face momentarily changed. He couldn’t describe it as a blank look, but for a fraction of a second he thought she was looking at something slightly in front of him that he couldn’t see.

  ‘You were officially declared born four hundred and forty Earth years ago.’

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘We don’t use that word anymore dear, you’ll have to learn some new ones. I’m going to crank up your neutragens now and leave you to rest a while, then I’ll be back to start your physicals after lunch.’

  ‘One more thing,’ said Dielle wearily as his brain began to vibrate. ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll have to ask yourself that question dear, I’m sure I don’t know.’ She smiled cheerfully as she turned on her heel and walked through a wall.

  Ask myself? Ask myself? What the hell does she mean? he thought.

  He dreamed of white osmotic walls and Kiki Pundechan.

  six

  He had no idea how long he’d slept, but at least he woke without having to go through the whole hitting-the-ground-at-high-speed thing again. This time it was weird. In his dream, Kiki had been floating around the white room, bobbing about like a balloon on the end of a string. One moment, she would be face to face with him, her eyes radiant behind the visor of her nurse’s helmet, then she would slowly drift away again until she seemed to blend into the wall, her uniform accentuating curves and proportions which appealed to him in ways he couldn’t fully understand. Cute, he thought. Cute? he thought. What does that mean?

  But as his dream faded out and reality faded in, the only thing that changed was his equilibrium because when he opened his eyes, there she was, exactly as he had been dreaming.

  She floated closer, smiled into his eyes, said ‘Hello dear. Did you have a nice rest?’ and started to recede again.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he asked, feeling spacey and on the verge of losing his lunch, except he hadn’t had any lunch for over 325 years so that wasn’t an option. ‘Would you mind just keeping still for a minute, please? I’m feeling a little nauseous.’

  ‘I am still, dear, it’s you who’s moving. Look.’ He found himself looking at his feet. Sure enough, they were moving underneath him, but they looked to be a lot further away than he thought they should be.

  ‘How did you do that?’ he demanded, as Kiki came back into view.

  ‘I’m controlling your recovery frame, dear. We’re going to have to teach your muscles how to work again. Don’t fret now, I kept you asleep for all the boring stuff and it won’t take long to get the hang of the rest. Do you remember what music is?’

  ‘Yes of course I remember what music is. I . . .’ he was about to say something else when he realised that although he knew what music was, he couldn’t actually recall any. How very odd, he thought.

  ‘Well, we’re going to play you some music while you do your exercises. You’ll find your brain rewires much quicker if you move around to a rhythm, so I’m going to transfer the frame control to Sister and she’ll play you some music. If you want something different, just call out.’ She turned and walked through a wall again. It bothered him when she did that, but he really liked the shape her body made when she turned, he just couldn’t figure out why.

  Rhythmic music filled the room – a gentle, repetitive beat interwoven with something that sounded like a human voice, but wasn’t. It was much richer, with a range of tones that made his scalp tingle with pleasure. Yes! he thought, as his adrenaline levels elevated and the recovery frame responded to the beat. He could sense the blood pumping in his veins. He was not the only one.

  ‘Louder!’ he shouted, and the music instantly ramped up in volume. He was really going to enjoy music, he thought, as the delicate articulated frame danced him around the white room. The bass rhythms resonated through his body as something deep in him stirred. When the first piece came to an end it was immediately followed by a different piece, this time with people singing together, hundreds of people, singing in a language he didn’t understand. It was wonderful and uplifting. He knew it was uplifting and didn’t give a damn why.

  An hour later he was physically exhausted but mentally elated. Pulmonary emties administered drugs to combat muscle fatigue and calm his brain, then the frame placed him in a c
omfortable resting posture. He fell asleep instantly and dreamed of Kiki again, but this time they were dancing. She was a pretty good dancer too.

  She came to wake him after the prescribed dream time had elapsed, and checked the status panel behind his head.

  ‘Hello dear, did you enjoy your dance?’ His warm smile answered her question.

  ‘You must pay attention to what I’m about to tell you, dear. Are you properly awake?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  She looked slightly blank again for a split second, then he instantly felt more alert – almost excited.

  ‘OK.’ Kiki took a breath. ‘Everything that happens in here is recorded and you have total control over its eventual exploitation. The cryo unit will take a standard admin percentage of 10% of gross after excessive taxes and data storage charges. In the event that any of the recorded material features me, I will receive a standard non-background participatory fee equivalent to 50% of your net receipts pro-rated. These rates are applicable for initial sumes only I’m afraid, and reduce to the standard 5% of net thereafter. Which I think is a bit mean, don’t you?’