Slabscape: Dammit Read online

  Contents

  Title page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  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

  twenty six

  epilogue

  more

  Notes

  SLABSCAPE: DAMMIT

  S.Spencer Baker

  Blip Books

  Kindle edition (webback version)

  First published in the UK in 2014 by Blip Books.

  Copyright © 2014 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 978-0-9930305-1-2

  Edited by Nick Coldicott.

  www.BlipBooks.com

  Dammit is the second in the Slabscape series. It was planned as a trilogy but seeing as I already have plot outlines for at least three more books, it doesn’t look like coming to any sort of conclusion in this asynchronology.

  The Slabscapedia turns the books into webbacks and was set up to be a repository for all the footnotes, glossaries, back-stories and spin-off ideas that otherwise would have interrupted the narrative. I wanted readers to be able to explore the ‘pedia from hot-links in the eBooks and discover more about the Slabscape universe at will. However, the quality of this experience depends on how well the eBook reader’s browser is integrated and, obviously, whether the eReader is connected to the internet.1 Some eReaders work better than others but they’ll probably all catch up eventually and the webbacks will be ready and waiting when they do. Why does the future take so long to arrive?

  It isn’t necessary have an eReader to access the ‘pedia because it’s freely available online at www.slabscapedia.com 2. Beware of linktrigues.

  SSB, Tokyo, October 2014

  Acknowledgments.

  Chapter twenty one includes a few lines taken from The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll (1832~1898). This work is in the public domain but that doesn’t mean the author doesn’t deserve gratitude and a credit.3

  Heartfelt thanks are due to Clan Runske4 of Grove House, Schull, County Cork, Ireland (www.grovehouseschull.com) for hospitality far beyond the call of duty while I was shoe-horning the first draft into sequential word-form-whatchamacallits. I will return.5

  Credit is also due to my posse of beta readers who helped root out the typos, bad science and inconsistencies: Grace Thompson, Jeremy Hunter, Terry Stroud, Arthur Edwards, Duncan Thornton, Greg Parker, David Hanthorn, Dave Lloyd, David Blackmore, Andrew Tees, Michal Spocko, Andy Collins, Markus Mulholland and Colin Vearncombe. If you would like to be considered as a beta reader for future books in the Slabscape series, please join the mailing list.

  for Y. (without whom. . . )

  one

  ‘Who do you think we are? A bunch of leafblowing cakes?’

  While that was surprisingly close to what he did think of the human contiguation of SlabCouncil, Louie couldn’t see how they could have possibly inferred that from what he’d just said.

  He glared at the group of assorted fuzzies, mythical beings and historical cultural icons, all of whom were intent on shouting him down.

  ‘Dicing wind farmer! Still thinks the universe revolves around that minuscule lump of rock.’

  ‘Complete and utter blocks!’

  Louie couldn’t have cared less what the interns called him. When he’d been the CEO of Earth’s largest privately owned corporation he’d faced humiliation and threats of physical violence every day, and that was just from his ex-wives. He’d been censured by politicians who had built their careers over the shattered remains of those they had destroyed through the masterful application of strategic verbal abuse. He’d been leaned on by tycoons he knew for certain had ordered concrete boots for some of his peers and yet he hadn’t batted an eye. It was all in a day’s work.

  Back then, Louie didn’t only have a thick skin, he had a thick, treacle-like aura and an even thicker wallet that he used to pay for a small army of thick-necked security advisors.

  Now that he was made of light the thickness of his skin was moot because he felt invulnerable. Even sticks and stones can’t hurt me now, he thought. It was going to take a lot more than a load of limp invective to stop him from giving SlabCouncil the benefit of his opinion.

  Louie tuned his glare to slit-eyes. ‘Any of you morons have a better idea?’

  He turned his back on the mutterers and surveyed the projections that filled the Universe Simulation Chamber where the emergency meeting was taking place. They showed multi-angle views of a double impossibility. Directly in their path was a rectangle the size of a solar system, a two-billion-kilometre-wide red banner suspended in space. It was almost a third of a lightyear away, but unless they took near-catastrophic evasive action, their current trajectory had them crashing into it in just under a SlabCyke. That was because they were currently travelling just below light-speed and their ability to manoeuvre without crushing the biomass was limited to course corrections on the nanoscale. If the data coming back from the sensors was accurate, the rectangle was only a few molecules thick so they had no practical reason to worry about punching a slab-shaped hole through it, but the sun-sized white letters in the middle of the sign gave them grounds to do much more than worry. They spelled out a simple and entirely implausible word: STOP.

  Not only was the existence of the sign impossible, the instruction was too. Even if they encased all 32 million of the Slab’s inhabitants in crunchfoam and applied maximum braking, it would take over forty Earth-years to come to a halt.

  Louie fixed on the nearest NAH. ‘How long has it been there?’

  ‘That’s an interesting question,’ said the Not Actually Human facsimile of Abraham Lincoln. The official role of the council NAHs, as mandated by the Initial Design, was to act as system representatives, but because they all had free will and full citizen rights they usually preferred to represent their own interests. Each NAH could be identified by a unique numerical designator, however, as they were noted for their highly developed sense of humour, most people called them Erik. They were all wearing baggy Hawaiian shirts today but Louie had refused to rise to the bait and ask why. His self-denial was amusing them immensely.

  ‘We delivered sensors to the site using the new emti-projection technique,’ said Erik. Emties were the ubiquitous matter transmitters that transported all the inanimate matter around Slab. They usually worked in pairs, one acting as a transmitter and the other as a receiver but the urgent need to transmit Louie into the dopplegänger Slab had driven the invention of a way of projecting emti receivers over large distances. ‘They’ve sent back some rather fascinating contradictory data.’

  When he’d been a self-styled business gurulla back on 21st-century Earth, Louie had had a zero-tolerance attitude to time wasters. But now that he was an interactive holog
ram embedded in a Nole®-powered mobile projector and could reasonably expect to live forever, he’d discovered a refreshing new control over his exasperation threshold. He could let a few things slide, he could kick back and let these self-absorbed pedants exercise their fascination with minutia. It didn’t bother him that they thought it more important to be precise than useful. He’d get his revenge later anyway. He tried a different tack. ‘What’s it made out of then?’

  ‘Mostly empty space,’ said Erik.

  ‘Empty red space,’ shrieked an intern in the guise of a black Dalek.

  Louie stared at him. What kind of idiot would want to be a… he thought, before reminding himself that trying to understand why interns behaved as they did was an even bigger waste of time than trying to get a straight answer out of a long-dead president.

  He took in an entirely redundant deep breath. ‘So we don’t know what it’s made out of, how long it’s been there, who put it there, or why?’

  ‘Not quite,’ said the Erik. ‘The cosmic ray erosion rate shows the material that makes up the sign can only have been in this configuration for less than one SlabCycle.’

  ‘So why didn’t you fucking say that before?’ Louie’s exasperation threshold wasn’t quite as flexible as he’d thought.

  The Erik looked at him with absolute indifference. ‘Because sir, it is fabricated from a hybrid, non-naturally occurring molecule that was created around 4,000 cykes ago.’

  Touché thought Louie while refusing to give away any hint that he’d just been bested. ‘So in Earth terms,’ he said ‘it’s only been there for four months and it’s over a thousand years old?’

  ‘If thinking about it in those terms helps you sir, then yes.’ The NAHs had, over many centuries, evolved condescension into a fine art. A group of loud-shirted Eriks in the corner muttered appreciatively.

  ‘And seeing that human civilisation was getting around by horse and buggy in those days and the magnetic compass was the zenith of human technology,’ said Ethless The Beautiful, ‘and that we’ve been travelling away from Earth at near lightspeed for over two thirds of our journey, your suggestion that this unfeasibly large stop sign is from Earth is not just ludicrous but physically impossible.’

  ‘It’s perfectly obvious what it is’, said a furry purple and green ball. ‘It’s first contact.’

  ‘First don’t contact more like,’ said one of the parrot avatars.

  ‘Look, whoever strung this stop sign over a solar system must have a pretty clear idea of where we are,’ said Louie. ‘Nobody’s going to go around putting up signs that size all over the galaxy on the off-chance that someone like us might be heading towards them.’

  ‘How do we know there aren’t other signs in different languages set up in a broad perimeter?’ said another Erik. ‘If the alien race that put it there knew what route an Ænglish-speaking civilisation would take towards them, they wouldn’t need to know where we were precisely, only which direction someone of your species would be coming from. That sign looks like it’s been waiting for us for a long time.’

  Louie crossed his irritation threshold. ‘So what are you saying? Aliens from light years away from Earth visited us a thousand years ago, decided that they didn’t want our sort parading around their part of the galaxy and put up a sign in our current language that somehow renews itself every few months for the sole purpose of warning us off, should we ever develop the technology to go star-hopping?’

  There was a murmur of approval and several of the intern avatars switched back into blanks. Their large, hairless heads nodded deliberately at each other. Huge, black almond eyes blinked slowly above pale, spindly bodies.

  ‘Oh come on!’ said Louie spinning his projection around furiously. ‘Roswell was dreamed up by a bunch of comic artists!’

  ‘You know that for sure, do you?’ said a floating, cross-legged swami.

  Louie knew he was wasting his time. Even though he had a lot of it to waste, it just wasn’t in his nature to squander resources, at least not his resources. ‘How did you lot ever get to be in charge of this tub? You refuse to accept the most likely possibility and prefer to believe a half-baked theory that has zero substantiating evidence.’

  ‘Actually sir,’ said Erik, ‘this theory is born out of a debate we have held in council for a considerable period. Some of us contend that it is highly presumptive to assume that we have the right to go anywhere we please. If we take it as read that we are not alone in this galaxy and that somewhere out there there are alien civilisations, then we can almost certainly expect to meet hostility sooner or later. We may be going a little too boldly after all. This stop sign is possibly the most non-threatening way any alien race could have of trying to prevent us from encroaching on their own territory and they – whoever they are – have gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure they communicate with us, in our own language, in a way that cannot be misinterpreted and at a scale beyond our imagining. Furthermore, the level of technology displayed indicates that avoidance is by far the best option.’

  Louie had never allowed himself to give in to fear-based decision making and he wasn’t about to start now. ‘You know, for a race of space-faring explorers you are the most useless bunch of air-balls I’ve ever met.’

  Ethless the Beautiful was upset again. She got upset easily, thought Louie, but as far as he was concerned, watching a warrior princess get heated had its compensations. ‘We are most emphatically not explorers!’ she said. ‘We are on a mission - a journey with a specific purpose. We are going Home and wouldn’t stop to explore the intervening diversions even if we could. We have one goal in which we are all invested, it is our sacred trust, and we must avoid anything that might prevent us from reaching it.’

  ‘Like super-sized stop signs?’

  ‘Especially super-sized stop signs.’

  ‘What are you going to do? Scoot around it and forget about it? You couldn’t wait to investigate FutureSlab even when you were afraid it might have been a terminal threat.’

  ‘It was precisely because it had the potential to be a terminal threat that we were compelled to take the initiative,’ said a furry, blue intern avatar who Louie had labelled Richard in a previous meeting. ‘It was direct, pertinent and contemporary. There is no evidence that this sign is a specific threat or that whoever put it there even knows we are here. They have made no attempt to communicate with us directly. For all we know the race that left the sign died off or moved on millennia ago.’

  ‘Look, it’s been there for four thousand cykes so it’s obvious that this sign is not specifically for us,’ said another fuzzy. ‘And if they knew our vector they would know there is absolutely no possibility that we could comply with their demand so that means that even if they are still around, they have no idea where we are or how fast we are moving.’

  ‘Unless they possess technology that could stop an artefact with our kinetic energy in time. In that case they might assume that we could too,’ said someone from the back. Louie couldn’t make out who because the dragon avatar in front had risen to its full height and unfurled two leathery, taloned wings.

  ‘They would have to make us,’ it bellowed. ‘Bloody cheek! Who do they think they are, telling us where we can go?’

  ‘Can’t stop. Wouldn’t if we could,’ said a Norwegian Blue. ‘Avoid it if we can, leave it as dust in our wake if we can’t.’

  Louie knew the interns had been communicating over their private networks while this exchange was going on and the parrot had just summarised the council’s collective decision. ‘Is that it then?’ He was incredulous. Interns were already leaving the projection chamber. They were not interested in further debate. At least not with him.

  ‘What does Sis have to say about this?’ asked Louie.

  Sis, or the SlabWide Integrated System, was the all-pervading overseer and controller of very nearly everything onSlab. Sis was woven into the fabric of the ship and in direct individual communication with every SlabCitizen in it. Every SlabCit
izen except for Louie that is. He was forced to voice his questions and receive voice or, occasionally, textural answers because his interactive holographic program had pre-dated their technology and he couldn’t interface directly in the way that the locals did, through their neural implants, or ‘eyes’. At least that was the excuse he’d been given for not being able to interact directly with the ship’s systems.

  ‘Naturally,’ said the Erik Louie knew best, ‘Sis agrees that we should divert and attempt to avoid the sign. But she’s highly reluctant to bleed off any of our speed and is, of course, bound by the decision of the council as long as that decision doesn’t threaten the biomass and I’m afraid there is simply no evidence to prove that it does.’

  ‘And as you are a system representative I guess it’s pointless asking for your opinion,’ said Louie. He turned to look at the screen and missed the NAH’s pained expression. ‘I still say it’s from Earth. I don’t know how they did it, but it’s them. We have to pay attention to this.’

  Erik bowed almost imperceptibly. ‘Your opinion has been added to the contiguation,’ he said. ‘Thank you for your input.’

  And fuck you too, thought Louie. ‘I guess you aren’t going to tell the Citizens?’

  ‘Council deems it prudent to control the release of any information that has the potential to induce panic. Council is, after all, charged with steering the moral decision-making onSlab and if it considers it necessary to make a course modification then it would be expected to make the right, informed choice without referring back to the biomass.’

  ‘Not exactly democratic is it?’ said Louie.