Slabscape : Reset Read online

  {[What was the name of that guy I met last night who was really bright? I was talking to him about the different Slab sections]}

  [[Fencer Dean Twenty; collectively recognised initiator of important intangible query assets]]

  {[Can I contact him?]}

  [[Yes, he opened his message filters to you while you were speaking to him last night]]

  {[Can you let him know that I’d like to meet him please?]}

  [[••]]

  Seconds later, Dielle was walking by a tubevex when it started to flash at him.

  [[•]]

  {[Deliver]}

  [[Fencer Twenty has accepted your request and authorised your transport to his current location at his own expense. Please take tube via indicated portal. Destination already set. Privacy bubble provided as courtesy]]

  Fast and friendly, I like his style, thought Dielle, stepping through the flashing membrane.

  As the privacy bubble descended, Sis told him the journey would take almost an hour and offered him some entertainment, again courtesy of his host. He declined. He thought he could make better use of his time asking some questions.

  {[What’s this message filter thing you just mentioned?]}

  [[All SlabWide communication via your neural implant has filter options. Your preferences are set to average, which means you only receive messages from individuals who you already know or who your heuristogram profile indicates you would like to know. If you meet someone and you’d like to receive communications from them, you simply add them to your allow filter]]

  {[What happens to messages from people I don’t know?]}

  [[They are kept in archive and the senders are informed of their non-receipt]]

  {[How many messages do I currently have in archive?]}

  [[624,323]]

  Dielle gorped.

  {[How can I possibly deal with all those?]}

  [[You don’t have to. It will help me to build up your heuristogram if I deliver a message to you at random, then you can tell me if you wanted to receive it in the first place and how you want to reply, if at all. After you’ve done a few, I will be able to process most of the rest of your messages on your behalf without further interaction]]

  {[Well, I guess I’ve got an hour. Let’s get started]}

  It didn’t take that long. Most of the messages were from people asking to have sex with him or just hang out with him. It was slightly worrying to him that at least 25% of these were from men. His ego couldn’t decide whether the requests were because he was irresistible or because they hoped to make a killing on the syndication rights on the recording of their hoped-for encounter. After dealing with about thirty or so of these, (some of which had suggested doing things he wasn’t sure were even physically possible) Sis informed him that she had built sufficient profile to deal with 90% of the outstanding messages. Most of the rest were advertisements or people asking for money. They were easy to deal with. Then there was a list of people he had met the previous night who had opened their personal filters to him and requested a reciprocal action. He did so, but asked Sis to only inform him of messages from these people when he wasn’t busy, which Sis advised him was a standard way of doing things. He noted, with a smile, that Faith-Sincere had sent him a voice message, telling him that she had enjoyed their little chat and saying how much she was looking forward to getting to know him better. He’d have to think about that one.

  There were several anon-untrace messages which meant that even though Sis knew who they were from, she wouldn’t tell him, and there was one message from an unknown source. Sis couldn’t explain how he could get a message from an unknown sender but she admitted that the comms system could be manipulated by some highly resourceful game-players and that, as a security precaution, she had not read the contents of the message. She advised him to ignore it too, as it was likely malicious or criminal in origin.

  It hadn’t occurred to Dielle that he might be the target of criminal activity. He hadn’t even considered that there might be real criminals in an environment where everything was monitored and recorded by the system. He was just about to ask Sis about this when she pinged him to let him know he’d reached his destination.

  Before he could get out, a light green furry beast burst into the bubble, accompanied by a storm of white flakes and freezing cold air. Dielle’s instincts put him into fight-or-flight mode but fortunately, before he did something he’d have regretted, the monster turned around to reveal the smiling face of the man Dielle had come to see.

  ‘Dielle! My man! Good to see ya!’ Fencer stuck out a huge gloved hand which Dielle grabbed with both of his and shook. Fencer wasn’t very tall and had a youthful, vaguely nervous manner but during their brief conversation the night before, Dielle had realised two significant things: first, Fencer was probably the single most intelligent human he had ever met, and second, as far as he could tell, Fencer wanted absolutely nothing from him.

  Fencer shoved a small package into Dielle’s hand. ‘Here, put this on and come outside!’ He stepped out amid another storm of flakes as Dielle opened the package. It softploded in his hands and expanded into a full-sized furry body suit similar to the one Fencer had been wearing. He put it on.

  {[What’s the white stuff?]}

  [[Snow. Aggregated frozen water crystals. You are in the winter levels of the new AllWeather section. The terrain here is currently being furbished]]

  The suit self-sealed and adjusted to his body temperature then expanded as several layers of foam were emtied into the outer skins.

  [[The foam is a new test material developed especially for this climate. It will provide flexible thermal insulation but hardens instantly to a virtually impenetrable shell in the case of a fall or imminent impact]]

  {[Cool. What’s it called?]}

  [[It doesn’t have a market name yet. Its ProtoName is Crunchfoam]]

  {[Catchy]}

  [[Watch your step]]

  Dielle stepped outside and immediately wished he hadn’t. He was standing on a ledge cut into the side of a steep mountain in the middle of a full-scale blizzard. He could barely see his feet.

  {[Where’s Fencer?]}

  [[Green]]

  A cascade of green squares led Dielle around the narrow ledge to a small corrie where Fencer was standing and waving his arms at a vertical wall of snow. He looked as though he was conducting a hidden orchestra. Dielle slapped him on his back to get his attention. Fencer turned around and stopped the blizzard with a wave of his hand.

  The silence was sudden and unnerving. Fencer pulled his hood back and smiled.

  ‘The glacier is coming along nicely, but we’re having a bit of a problem getting this snow to stick at the higher altitudes. It keeps falling off in sheets. Rather spectacular to watch, but not the effect we’re aiming for. I’m trying to figure out a solution,’ said Fencer, kicking a new batch of snow which collapsed onto his boots. ‘I think we’ll have to compact it with more wind and alternate freezing and thawing.’

  The air cleared to reveal the magnificent Graphite mountains. Externally they were exact replicas of the most famous peaks and alpine features of Earth and ranged over 10,000 square kilometres of the AllWeather section. Internally they housed millions of cubic metres of desperately needed state-of-the-art storage and retrieval facilities. Dielle knew none of this. He’d been too busy staring at the view to ask. Unfortunately, the visual effect the designers had worked so hard to achieve was somewhat marred by the moth-eaten patches of snow clinging pitifully to the highest slopes. The snow glistened wetly under the harsh glare of the only mobile sun onSlab.

  ‘Very impressive. Can’t you just add some glue?’

  ‘Snow glue. Yes, we’ve been working on that. We think it’s called ice.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad it’s your problem and not mine. Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to disturb you while you were busy.’

  ‘I’m not busy! Let’s go and get something hot and ratted to drink. There’s a great little lodge nearb
y we’ve opened up just for the crew. I think we’ll keep it secret too – it’ll be a good place to come when you want to chill out. Ha! Chill out! Get it?’ Fencer was a likeable chap despite his propensity to laugh at his own bad jokes.

  Dielle followed Fencer back along the narrow ledge to the tube, peeked over the edge and threw himself back against the sheer rock face.

  ‘SHIIIIII..! How high are we?’

  ‘About three kilometres here I think,’ said Fencer cheerily, disappearing through the vex.

  Dielle clung to the snow, paralysed by fear. Slowly, it started to shift.

  fifteen

  Louie wanted to rub his hands together with glee, but as he wouldn’t have felt the benefit, and being aware of the mood of the joyless interns around him, he decided that a look of grave concern would be a better pitch.

  He’d instantly warmed to Sis. She was straight to the point, with no emotional colouring or personal agenda. Louie liked doing business with people like that. Too bad he’d never met any back on Earth, he thought.

  ‘SlabCouncil deems it essential to investigate the interior of the entity designated FutureSlab,’ said Sis via a replica of a long-dead American president doing an outstanding job of impersonating one of the greatest sex icons of twentieth-century Earth. In contrast to the interns, the Eriks had an extremely well developed sense of humour. ‘They believe that it is either our Slab from some alternate or future time-line,’ she continued, ‘or it is a copy, made by some alien intelligence for a purpose which we cannot currently understand. Either way, Council has determined it must know.’

  One of the furries shouted ‘Coldslaw!’ which Louie took to mean they didn’t like the idea. Either that or they were hungry. In fact it was a reference to ‘Cold’s Law’ named after Nathaniel Nathan Cold, a little-known late-nineteenth-century-Earth physicist whose famous maxim is usually rephrased as: Don’t fuck about with something you don’t understand.

  Louie didn’t care. He was just happy to know they needed him for something. Throughout his life he had developed a finely tuned feral instinct for leveraging weaknesses into maximum personal benefit. It was this talent that had made him, at one point, the second richest man on Earth. The richest at the time was Louie’s business partner – and he was the richest only because Louie had negotiated the deals that way. Poor old Milus, thought Louie, but not with any feeling.

  ‘Every possible precaution will be taken to ensure that there are no negative consequences for Slab,’ said Sis. ‘Yield to question on the floor from 434 0955.’

  ‘How can we be sure,’ said the guy Louie had tagged as Richard, ‘that our attempts to investigate the FutureSlab, which may run the risk of violating some form of time continuum or alternate universe anomaly, isn’t what was, or rather will be, responsible for our potentially disastrous future?’

  This was met by a chorus of comments.

  ‘Good point.’

  ‘I already said that.’

  ‘Causality conjecture!’

  Erik raised his hand. ‘Respected interns,’ he said with his Abe Lincoln sincerity effect on maximum. ‘There is little point in debating this question over and over again. Majority consensus can be summarised as: If it is, then it’s already happened, or rather it already will have happened and if it isn’t then it’s no problem.’

  ‘What about free will?’ asked Louie. ‘Don’t we get a choice?’

  ‘Of course we do,’ said Erik. ‘And we choose to find out what it is.’

  ‘But if you said it already has been going to happen . . .’ Louie’s holographic brain threw a loop error. ‘No, just forget it,’ he shook his head. ‘What’s been done to investigate it so far?’

  ‘Everything we can do remotely has been done and has revealed exactly what we’ve told you – which is not much. The only thing we can do is try to get inside it and find out what will have happened. If you get my drift.’

  Louie could almost smell the money. ‘And you can’t. Right?’

  ‘No, we can’t.’

  Still the same old Louie Drago, thought Louie triumphantly. They could download him, freeze him, store him for hundreds of years and project him into space, but they couldn’t take away his nose for a deal.

  ‘And that’s why you want to talk to me, huh?’

  ‘That,’ said Marilyn in a particularly breathy voice, ‘is exactly why we want to talk to you, Mr Drago.’

  The screens lit up again with argument and counter argument. Avatars were shouting at each other on every available channel. Louie couldn’t make out what the main problem was but it seemed to be a philosophical one. He might have had a superb nose for business, but when it came to philosophy he stopped well short of Plato. He used to say he stopped short of Pluto, but realised that that particular gag had had its day. In Louie’s entire life his biggest philosophical problem had been trying to decide who he might persuade to pay for his lunch. Surprisingly, as he had become richer and richer, this task had become easier and easier, leading him to discover a truism which he was fond of quoting: The more you can afford something, the greater the number of people who fall over themselves to give it to you for nothing. Now that, he thought, is real philosophy.

  The only way to get anyone or anything inside the FutureSlab was to use an extended relay of emties. The first problem was that emties required both receiving and transmitting ends to function, so they had to figure out how to transmit a receiver through fifty kilometres of Natalite from over a thousand kilometres away. This had been a particularly hard one to solve, but recent developments in the war had spurred weapons researchers into experimenting with projecting nano-scale emti receivers over very long ranges. Conceived to enable warhead delivery inside enemy ships by stealth, they relied on a self-replicating cascade effect. Unfortunately, the whole process was inherently unstable and tended to suffer what the military liked to call ‘spontaneous failure events’. This didn’t matter as long as they were trying to blow up the receiving end, but mattered a lot when they were trying to retrieve something. Such as a holographic recording device.

  The next problem was more complicated and went back to an argument that had been running for as long as emties had been around.

  Emti technology had been invented on Earth a long time before Slab was built. It would have been virtually impossible to have constructed anything on the scale of Slab without matter transmission technology which had made it possible to deliver enormous masses into Earth orbit at very little cost. If it had been left to rocket science, mankind would have been incarcerated forever on its tiny, doomed planet, futilely trying to boost payloads into the outer atmosphere which were ninety percent comprised of the fuel required to get them there.

  The man who had invented matter transmission (or, more accurately, accidentally discovered it during a drug-fuelled weekend of sexually motivated, obsessive behaviour) was Milus Blondel. He and his business partner formed the Institute for Research into the Already Known which, using the impossible-to-comprehend amount of money the M.T. technology generated, coupled with Milus’s incredible knack for asking stupid questions, also discovered anti-gravity and several other inventions of major importance during the middle of the twenty-first century. Milus’s business partner, the man who had negotiated all the deals, who had been his advisor, protector and occasionally even friend, was Louis Clinton Drago.

  Louie had never fully understood what all the fuss was about. Emties were the wonder of the age. They could be used to transport almost anything anywhere at very low cost. They revolutionised so many aspects of life that it was impossible to quantify just how widespread the effects were. They had transformed transportation and delivery systems, ended the world’s reliance on petroleum products, radically altered building and city construction, delivered freshwater from ice-caps to deserts, removed waste and separated it into constituent molecules for super-efficient recycling; they had changed people’s lives forever and even done away with the dry-cleaners (a personal triumph for Louie).
They had also made him and Milus incredibly rich. Unbelievably rich. Rich enough to buy the State of California. But there were just a couple of small problems with the emti.

  First, they couldn’t be used to transport human beings. There would be no beaming up, down or sideways for any future space captains because emties were only allowed to work on non-animate objects. They had discovered that if a human being was transported using a big enough, properly tuned emti, the body would be transferred, but the soul, being non-physical, wouldn’t. Louie couldn’t understand why this had bothered anyone, but as the practice produced a sudden influx of advertising and music business executives, it was banned.

  The second, slightly more significant problem was what happened when some bright spark in IRAK’s Malibu research labs decided to build a machine that would transmit itself to a receiver attached to a long arm connected to the machine it was transmitting from. The idea was simple: as all emti transmissions happen instantaneously, the result should be faster-than-light travel. No-one knows exactly what happened because the simulcast of the experiment ceased when the count-down reached zero, but the instant dematerialisation of most of Southern California led to the law requiring all emties to have built-in Auto-Self-Sensing Closedloop OVERflow protection.

  Even though most of IRAK’s assets bar Louie's Manhattan offices had been wiped out by The Disappearance, Louie thought most people had overreacted. Arizona Bay had rapidly filled with the Pacific Ocean, which had the effect of returning global sea levels to those the world had enjoyed before global warming had turned Greenland and Antarctica into arable farmland. The energy released during the event had permanently fused the San Andreas fault, making the entire western seaboard earthquake-free and, usefully for the marine leisure industry, longer. And of course, the movie business improved dramatically. Louie thought that the pluses far outweighed the minuses. Not everyone had agreed with him.

  Nobody was agreeing with anyone now. General consensus in SlabCouncil was that it was unethical, immoral and illegal to ask any sentient being to be transported by the series of emti relays into the emti receiver that they were hypothesising could be projected into the FutureSlab.