Slabscape : Reset Page 12

  ‘Well, they’re welcome to him as far as I’m concerned,’ said Dielle. ‘He’s a pain in the ass. In fact, if you had to define pain in the ass, Louie Drago’s name should be top of the list.’

  ‘I’ll see to it,’ said Charlie. ‘When they said they wanted to bring you back, I naturally assumed they needed something from you. Like some older, pre-equalisation genes or some such blocks they’re always bloody fiddling with. But it turned out they weren’t interested in you – at least not yet. You, in the hands of this very capable young lady,’ he nodded again to Kiki who accepted his compliment with grace, ‘are turning into a big star. Good luck to you. In fact, as president, I can even help you.’

  ‘Oh no!’ said Kiki springing up. ‘No way! You’re not getting any of this action you conniving, stimmed-out windfarmer! So that’s what this is about!’

  ‘No, no! No! Calm down! I don’t need any of your deal.’ He looked genuinely frightened of Kiki. ‘Look, it’s very simple. Something’s going on and they won’t tell me what it is. His,’ he stabbed his finger at Dielle, ‘previous incarnation has been scooped up into that bloody carnival they call council and I want to know why. I’ll trade you guaranteed rating enhancement if you can find out from Louie what the dice is going on.’

  ‘Well, you know, I kind of had another agenda sketched out,’ said Kiki, turning immediately into negotiation mode. ‘I’ve seen some of the sume footage and I don’t think Louie comes over well for the demographic.’

  It was Dielle’s turn to be shocked. ‘You know about Louie?’

  ‘Of course I know about Louie, dear, I’m your agent. It’s my job to know everything about you.’ She turned back to Charlie. ‘He’s a holo, he’s just not human enough for the major feeds. It’s not what they’re looking for.’

  ‘Tiger, listen to me,’ said Charlie. ‘This is something big. I don’t know what yet, but it might be about the war. Something they’re too frightened to tell us. There’s a rumour they captured a ship and found a living alien inside it. Massive isn’t saying anything but I know that dumb fuck is hiding something. I think they want Louie to do something for them that’s connected with all this. You’d like a piece of that action, I’ll bet.’

  Kiki took a breath. ‘If this screws with my artist’s career I’ll . . . ’ Kiki wasn’t sure what the she could actually do that could threaten the president so she left it hanging.

  ‘Don’t I get a say in this?’ asked Dielle, wondering when he’d been elevated to the status of artist.

  ‘No.’ said Charlie and Kiki in unison.

  ‘But I’m the one who has to talk to Louie, aren’t I?’

  Kiki and Charlie looked at each other in frustration. Dielle suspected they were passing messages through Sis and wondered how they could be sure Sis wasn’t passing them on to the SlabCouncil.

  {[How is this being kept secret?]} No answer.

  {[Sis? Can you hear me?]} No answer.

  ‘OK,’ said Kiki after a few minutes. ‘But I want top table for every public function and direct links from all your feeds.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Charlie protested. ‘I only want some inside information, not the bloody system encryption code!’

  Kiki and Charlie went on like this for some time. Dielle was getting bored with it all and, with no-one to talk to, decided to do a bit of acrobatic practice. He needed to speak to Louie about a few things anyway, so it didn’t really bother him much, he thought, as he bounced from UpSideDown to DownSideUp and back again.

  Over by the antique view-screen, the negotiations came to a satisfactory conclusion. Charlie looked over at Dielle, happily wheeling in mid-air.

  ‘Bit of a kid, isn’t he?’ he said privately to Kiki. ‘Shouldn’t you be investing your considerable talents in a more mature man?’ He reached down and squeezed Kiki’s ass.

  ‘Oi! You can’t do that!’ shouted Dielle from the ceiling.

  ‘Course I can mate, didn’t you get the memo? I’m the fucking president!’ He walked over to the table and turned back to Kiki. ‘I’ll lift the rose. Ready?’ Kiki reactivated the dress and nodded her floating head. The shimmering hemisphere collapsed.

  ‘Hey!’ called Dielle from above. ‘Can I have some more of that Scotch?’

  Charlie looked straight up at him and held his gaze. ‘Sure you can, just as soon as you figure out a way of going back for more.’ He turned to Kiki and held out his hand. ‘Shall we join the citizens?’

  thirteen

  ‘How long have you known about this?’ Louie asked the small audience of avatars standing inside a detailed reproduction of a Roman bathhouse. The NAHs had all donned togas and were in constant motion, describing complex paths around the periphery of the space and forming spontaneous cliques, muttering to each other while sneaking sideways glances at the group in the centre and then moving on. All the NAHs looked exactly the same as the one that had collected Louie from the park. Although each individual could be identified by a unique number, everybody just called them Erik. The avatars represented human interns and they too all looked the same: pale, frail humanoids with bulbous, bald heads, long, skeletal limbs and huge almond eyes which blinked slowly and deliberately at Louie’s projection.

  Louie’s vDek was arranged to make him look as though he was sitting behind a white marble table under a canopy of dense green leaves that swayed in the breeze. A sunny Mediterranean sky was visible between a semicircle of white, Doric columns. Sublimators embedded into the flora filled the air with calming aromatic oils. It was wasted on Louie. He hadn’t paid for olfac.

  They’d travelled here in a privacy field while Louie absorbed as much information as possible about the artefact, so although he hadn’t a clue where onSlab they were, he was fairly sure that none of what he could see would pass any reasonable definition of real.

  Louie looked around at fifteen pairs of blinking eyes and waited for an answer. Except for the sounds of running water and exotic birds, there was complete silence. Time passed while Louie regretted that his fingers couldn’t make a drumming sound. Then the avatars came to a collective response.

  ‘There are several among us who do not agree to include you in our forum,’ said one of them in a soft, flowing female voice. ‘Providing an answer to your question is not a simple matter.’

  ‘We have known about the FutureSlab for more than a cycle,’ interrupted another avatar with a younger, more aggressive male voice. Oh good, thought Louie, at least they sound different. ‘The NAHs assure us they were made aware of it at the same time as we were and we have no evidence that contradicts this claim.’

  ‘However,’ said a third, a female much older and more precise in tone and manner, ‘we have reason to believe that Sis has known about this phenomenon for a lot longer and has deliberately withheld the information from us.’

  This statement produced a fluttering of comments and murmurs. One of the Eriks, who was standing alone by a distant column, turned around and raised his voice.

  ‘Citation!’ He waived his hat angrily, gaining everyone’s attention. ‘We cannot support that statement without citation.’

  The avatars all turned back to look at Louie.

  ‘They always say that,’ said the older woman who Louie had decided to call Ethel. ‘It’s a smoke screen. We suspect Sis has kept this quiet for a very long time.’

  ‘Where is Sis?’ asked Louie, exasperated. ‘I have got to talk to her. Or it. Whatever.’

  ‘She is everywhere and nowhere, she is in everything and everyone,’ said the first female. Jane, thought Louie, definitely a Jane. ‘You can talk to System through any of us or the Eriks whenever you want.’

  ‘How will I know I’m talking to Sis and not you?’

  ‘What would you like us to do? Wave a flag?’ said the aggressive younger guy.

  Shithead, thought Louie. ‘No, I don’t want you to wave a flag, I want to speak to a person. Can’t she take over an Erik or something – they’re supposed to be system representatives aren’t they?’
A tremor went through the group.

  ‘All NAHs have full citizen rights, Mr Drago.’ It was Jane again. ‘The coerced subversion of a conscious entity is one of our highest moral crimes. It would be as offensive as having your own personality overridden by another, more powerful entity. Mind rape, Mr. Drago.’

  ‘Hey!’ said Louie, trying to break the mood. ‘Call me Louie!’ He thought for a moment. ‘What about a speaker then?’

  ‘Everyone speaks for themselves here, we have no appointed leaders or presiding officers.’

  ‘No, not that type of speaker; a loudspeaker. You know, a panel in a box that sound comes out of. A spea-ker.’ Louie said the last word slower and louder, trying to describe a box shape with his hands.

  ‘Why would that help?’

  ‘Look, you all hear Sis in your heads right? I can’t, and Erik over there tells me my programming is so old that it’s not possible to let me interface with Sis directly. I have to hear a real voice so I’d want it to be a voice I can identify as Sis, and come from something I can direct my question at. Why is that so difficult to understand?’

  ‘You want to give Sis an actual voice and a physical presence?’ asked an older male voice with an authoritative tone and a Scottish accent. The name Richard came immediately to Louie’s mind.

  All the avatars turned to look at each other, silently blinking and slowly nodding their heads. Then, as one, they turned and wandered off in different directions.

  ‘Hey!’ called out Louie. He was stranded; even the Eriks wouldn’t come close to him. They continued to walk around, forming small spontaneous groups which would usually disperse after a few minutes. It was like watching a formal dance in which nobody ever danced, but everyone got asked.

  Eventually, one of the alien avatars wafted back and sat next to him.

  ‘I’m afraid your request has proved to be impossible to comply with.’ It was Ethel.

  ‘Why is it such a big deal? Can’t I just have a terminal or something?’

  ‘You request is to hear a manifestation of a voice we all have had in our heads since we were born, Louie. To every single one of us that voice is like a guardian, a teacher, a constant companion and an intimate confidant. We all have our own versions of what that voice represents. Sis is unique to each of us and yet you wish to give her a discrete personality.’

  ‘Kind of like when they had to cast a new James Bond, huh?’

  The avatar blinked at Louie for a while.

  ‘System admin representative 001.735.3160, the Erik that brought you here, has volunteered to act as guide and, let’s say, conduit for your conversations with Sis.’ She was clearly extremely uncomfortable about this. ‘The interns have approved this course of action, but most of the NAH’s have departed in protest, despite the expediency of this selfless act for which we are most grateful.’

  ‘Yeah, well, dupe. Way to go, Erik. Can we get on with it now?’

  ‘Many of the contiguation have requested avatar presence so it has been decided to expand our arena.’ The avatar bent down gracefully and stretched an elegant arm towards Louie’s vDek. ‘If you will allow me?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, grinning. ‘Take me to your leader.’

  ‘It is important that you understand that SlabWide Integrated System, or Sis, is neither our leader nor our servant. We exist in a highly evolved symbiotic relationship where Sis acts entirely independently but always with our best interests at heart. Council was instigated as part of the Initial Design with a fixed ratio of human interns to non-human representatives who are all autonomous individuals and have free will as defined by the Not Actually Human Resources charter of cycle 238. As such, Slab has no specific leader who can be identified individually and our political hierarchy can be classified as a machine-resident benevolent dictatorship with human peer-moderated decision-guidance and monitoring apparatus. The interns function anonymously and are not associated with our real identities in order that no personal power can be devolved to any specific individual. In essence, we are led by our anonymous selves, so it is not possible for me to comply with your request.’

  And you have absolutely no sense of humour, do you? thought Louie. Well, he thought, it sounded a pretty mad way of doing things, but it had to be better than democracy. That had been a real screw-up.

  They had been walking down into a marble amphitheatre during Ethel’s explanation. Noisy, restless avatars jostled for room. As he watched, several of the pale alien avatars morphed into a variety of weirdly shaped humanoids, furry blobs, winged beasts, glowing orbs, comic-book stars and wizards. Why must there always be wizards? thought Louie.

  ‘It’s getting serious,’ said Ethel. ‘You note the avatars changing? That means the interns are showing up in person as opposed to ghosting the blanks. Oh well, I will have to finish off what I was doing later.’

  Ethel’s avatar changed into a busty, blonde Amazon in a skin-tight bodice. She had all the accoutrements of a warrior goddess: Viking helmet, glowing magic shield, bejewelled scabbard and dynamite legs in thigh-high leather.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘Now I’m all here.’

  Louie looked her up and down and whistled. ‘Wow! Will you marry me?’

  Ethel looked down at him. Louie realised he was going to have to give her a new name. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Sarcasm. I was told you were a bit of a humorist.’

  Louie hadn’t been joking, but he thought he might as well smile. ‘I shall call you Ethless the Beautiful.’

  ‘Why?’ said Ethless the Beautiful. ‘That is not my name. I have no name here.’

  Because Ethel the Joyless doesn’t have the same ring to it, thought Louie as she placed his vDek on a small podium at the front of the stage. Erik walked over from a conclave of the few remaining NAHs who were anxiously milling around, adjusting their togas. He sat down as a small, square section of the stage rose up to meet him. The audience hushed.

  ‘We are going to conduct this session in full auditory mode,’ said Erik. ‘You are free to use system-facilitated communications as always but your comments will not be considered public unless vocalised.’

  There was a disgruntled murmur from the assembly.

  Louie raised both arms in an exaggerated shrug. ‘Sorry guys!’

  ‘As you know,’ continued Erik, ‘I will be acting in a mediation capacity between our honoured guest and SlabWide Integrated System.’ More murmurs and a few muted laughs and coughs. ‘For the purpose of identifying my speech on behalf of System as distinct from my own, it has been decided that I shall employ a female voice when answering with words that are not mine.’ Erik paused and looked up at the ceiling/sky for a moment. ‘In order to satisfy the majority of those present, the voice you hear will be that of the twentieth-century-Earth screen idol Miss Marilyn Monroe.’

  Uproar. Avatars were standing and shouting and throwing shards of light which dissipated before hitting the stage. Shouts of disgrace! Sacrilege! Abomination! Bloody good oh! and Nice one Erik! mingled with hoots of derisive laughter, cheering and whistles. The last of the NAHs departed during the disruption.

  Jeez, thought Louie. Nearly four hundred years on and we’re still run by a bunch of children.

  Erik waited for the disruption to settle, then turned to Louie. ‘We understand that you can read Ænglish.’

  Louie nodded.

  ‘Good. We have arranged for a series of text-based feeds which will be visible to you and no one else.’

  Three translucent black panels rose out of the stage to form a semicircle in front of Louie, stopping just below his shoulder level.

  ‘The centre panel will display any additional information you request directly from Sis; the right side will display general queries from the participants to Sis; and the left will form a record of all non-vocalised, intra-participant communication. You have the right to make any of this information public by speaking it out loud. This is as close to normal as we can simulate without connecting you directly to Sis.’

  Text fla
shed past Louie’s eyes, green on the left, red on the right, but too quick for him to read more than a few words. He thought he caught a few green comments about him. None of them looked complimentary.

  ‘Hey! Can you slow them down a little?’ The two outer screens slowed to a fast reading speed and the central panel displayed a message directly from the SlabWide Integrated System in light blue text: Random comments displayed, no edit. Impossible to display all conversations at reading speed. Archive recording available for later research. Your eyes only.

  Well hello, thought Louie, nice to meet you too.

  ‘This meeting is called to decide on a course of action regarding FutureSlab,’ said Erik, raising his normal voice to hush the background unrest.

  ‘OK,’ said Louie. ‘I’ve got a question straight off: Why are you calling it FutureSlab?’

  A fuzzy blue avatar rose and spoke in a strong, clear voice. It was the one Louie had tagged as Richard earlier. ‘The slab you have seen ahead of us is identical to our slab in every perceivable detail except one. It even has the same scar on its right edge – a scar that was formed over 350 cycles ago as a result of a chunk of space debris that evaded our gravity traps and gouged a groove in our starboard flank. It is inconceivable that what we observe is anything other than our own Slab but somehow shifted into the future – our future.’

  Louie wasn’t convinced. ‘Every detail except one?’

  ‘Heat, Mr Drago,’ said another avatar, a pretty female with wings and a diaphanous gown. ‘It is our only export and detectable signature. Nearly thirty-two million individuals create a very large amount of heat and if we didn’t move the excess out into the infrared thermal radiators, we would all melt. However, the FutureSlab is, for all intents and purposes, the same temperature as the surrounding space. It is cold. Very, very cold.’

  ‘So you’re assuming no-one is on it then?’

  ‘We don’t know for sure because we can’t get close enough to use any other means of detection,’ said Erik.