Slabscape : Reset Page 18

‘Yeah, well, I don’t think I’ll be able to remember much. Must be this shiff you gave me.’

  ‘You know man? You an’ me, we’re going to get along!’

  Dielle was pretty sure he was right.

  When he got back to the presidential box there was a party in progress. Dielle guessed there were a couple of hundred people in there [[178]] with just enough room for the few more who were pushing past from the transvex behind him. He could see Kiki in the middle, laughing. She enjoyed being the centre of attention. She glowed.

  ‘Hello handsome,’ said a sultry voice close behind him. ‘Are you avoiding me or is Tiger holding your leash too tight?’

  Dielle knew who it was without looking. He could feel her curves pressing against his body. They were the type of curves a six-day-old twenty-seven-year-old guy doesn’t forget. Ever.

  ‘Ms Van Darwin,’ said Dielle without turning round. ‘What a pleasure.’

  ‘Yes, it will be,’ breathed Faith-Sincere, getting even closer.

  ‘I didn’t return your messages because I, er,’ Dielle hesitated, desperately trying to think of something witty and subtly suggestive. He gave up. ‘Because I didn’t know what to say.’

  ‘How charming!’ He could feel her breath against the back of his neck, making the hairs stand up involuntarily for the second time that afternoon. This time they were accompanied. ‘Old fashioned honesty. So refreshing.’

  ‘Do you think that Kiki would approve of us being so honest with each other?’ asked Dielle, trying to sound obvious, but still not turning round.

  ‘Approve? She sent me the basic terms of the deal earlier, otherwise I don’t think the vex would have allowed me through, do you?’

  ‘What deal?’ asked Dielle, turning around angrily. ‘Don’t I get a say at all?’

  ‘Oh, you do, but I don’t,’ said Faith, her eyes flashing danger. ‘The only deal she’s offering gives me no edit rights before sumecast, no share in any residuals and no distribution control.’

  ‘What does all that mean?’

  ‘It means, my beautiful, handsome boy, that the only reason I would fuck you is for love.’

  Dielle looked her up and down. He was fighting hard not to reach out to touch the curves of her hips. Her long, flowing hair contrasted boldly with the tight, dark silk of her bodice. ‘And that means?’ he said trying not to sound strangled.

  ‘Darling,’ she snarled, looking him in the eyes with a desire he could practically smell. ‘Do you know how long it’s been since I fucked a man for love?’

  ‘I couldn’t even . . . ’

  ‘One hundred and twenty of your miserable, primitive Earth years!’ she said, raising her voice and swivelling on her pin-sharp stilettos. ‘Tell your so-called agent that the Universe will be a singularity in non-space before Faith-Sincere Van Darwin gets subSumed by a second-rate, two-bit Wobbler!’

  ‘You are talking about the woman I love!’ protested Dielle, worried that he might be sounding less than genuine.

  ‘Ha! Love? You’re still in diapers and you’re talking about love? We’ll see about that!’ And with a toss of her animated hair she stormed off, disappearing through the transvex. He turned sheepishly back to the room hoping that no-one had noticed. Somebody let out a high-pitched gasp then everyone started applauding and cheering enthusiastically. Unfortunately for Dielle, none of them were watching the race. Kiki had tears in her eyes.

  The party fizzled seconds after the last race was won. Dielle had lost track of how many people he’d met who were delighted with the result of his encounter with Faith-Sincere, or the entertainment as they were calling it, but he hadn’t had the opportunity to broach the subject with Kiki.

  ‘I had no idea she was that old,’ Dielle said to Kiki as she flopped down, exhausted, on a form chair. ‘Why does everyone hate her so much?’

  ‘Because she runs the most successful chain of ego massage parlours onSlab, is the highest paid ego therapist with the most exclusive client list and she has the single most expensive body in the known universe,’ said Kiki, taking off her high boots.

  ‘Ego massage?’

  ‘Dielle! Dahling!’ said Kiki with sparkling eyes and a scary smile. ‘We were just talking about you! How much we all missed you! You are looking just great! Oh it’s so wonderful you came into our little parlour when there are so many to choose from. Have you been working out? You look even better than last time you came in and that’s really hard to believe. Sit your sweet, gorgeous body down while Samantha here gets you something to drink and waggles her plastic tits five centimetres from your face.’

  ‘Right. I see,’ said Dielle. ‘But that doesn’t explain why everyone dislikes her.’

  ‘That’s because they all secretly use her so-called therapy but refuse to admit it. So much so that they go out of their way to put her down. It’s like a SlabWide sport among the rich and famous. That and the fact that she really is a two-faced, professionally disingenuous, artificially enhanced from spleen to pore bitch.’

  ‘She speaks highly of you,’ lied Dielle.

  ‘She speaks highly of anyone who pays her to speak highly of them,’ said Kiki with venom. ‘And I know for sure that doesn’t include me.’

  ‘Is there something I should know about? Something in the past between you two?’

  ‘The only thing you should know about is that she wants to fuck you because she wants the publicity and demands complete control over the sume edit, no doubt to hide her sagging million-bucks-a-piece breasts. Also, that she’s just formally dropped negotiations and that’s fine because we don’t need her sorry ass.’

  Dielle thought it prudent not to tell Kiki that whatever the reasons Faith-Sincere had for pulling out of the deal, breast-sag wasn’t one of them. It was odd, but despite being very unsure about his lover/agent negotiating who should and shouldn’t get an opportunity to romp around naked with him, the fact that Faith-Sincere had decided not to agree a deal made him want her more. That, he thought, might become a problem. A change of subject seemed in order.

  ‘Are you tired?’ he asked, rubbing Kiki’s feet.

  ‘A bit. Why, darling?’

  ‘Because I met this really cool musician called Fingerz Jeez and he’s playing somewhere later and I thought we might go and see him. I think I want to learn how to play the keys and he said he thought I’d be good at it, if I can, er, find out who I am, or something.’

  ‘Fingerz Jeez? Never heard of him.’ A millisecond pause. ‘Oh right, he’s playing in Rick’s Bar in TorryTown. That’s UpSide night strip. Do you want to go out to a night, darling? That’ll be fun. We haven’t been to one yet.’

  ‘Not if you’re too tired,’ said Dielle. The massage had moved higher up and he was starting to go off the idea of going out.

  Kiki brightened almost instantly. ‘No, I’m fine dear! I just emtied some Buzz and I’m keen to go. Learn the keys, huh? That could generate a nice sideline. Just let me get my things.’

  She sprang up, picked up her boots and threw them into an emti hovering nearby, then reached in and took out a pair of comfortable flats.

  {[Buzz?]}

  [[Popular non-addictive stimulant. Increases the body’s metabolic rate and neutralises fatigue poisons]]

  {[Can I have some?]}

  [[No. You don’t need any]]

  {[What? Aren’t you supposed to do as I ask?]}

  [[Who gave you that idea?]]

  ‘Hey!’ he called to Kiki. ‘I thought Sis was supposed to give me anything I asked for.’

  ‘Who gave you that idea?’ asked Kiki, waiting at the transvex. ‘Come on. We’ll be late for the first set.’

  Dielle was thoughtful during the descent from the spectator platform to the tube system. Once they were on their way in a tube privacy field he tested a line of enquiry with Sis but didn’t get very far. They were routed crosSlab to a Z-axis conduit, part of the tube system that linked the two downs. The e-zee was built into the wall that separated Seacombe from The Strip and day from ni
ght and acted like an express elevator. At midpoint their bubble went through a split-second of weightlessness and flipped over but were it not for a slight discontinuity in Kiki’s shower, it would have been completely undetectable.

  ‘I think you might want to check the type of music Fingerz plays,’ Dielle said to Kiki as she shimmied into a form-fitting dance suit. She paused for a moment, looked at him, longazed and wrinkled her nose.

  ‘Is that the type of music you want to learn to play?’ she said, getting undressed again and pulling a loose fitting dress and a belt from her bag.

  ‘Sure! If I can. That is, if I have any talent.’

  ‘You’ll need to get a stim unit if you want to avoid tens of cykes of practice.’

  ‘Yeah, he mentioned that. Though Sis has just given me the impression there was something questionable about learning that way.’

  ‘It’s just the purists, dear. They give neg about technology that avoids having to do hard work but of course you don’t see them walking from days to nights. Just because you can learn how to play any musical instrument in a few hours with a good stim, doesn’t mean your skills aren’t just as valid as doing it the old fashioned way. I’ll give PT a ping if you like, although after you bent his nose I’m not sure he’ll be so hungry for the commission.’

  Dielle wasn’t keen to see PT again either.

  The tube deposited them in a busy public area with a black sky. Black, that is, aside from a galaxy of gaudy neon, holo-projections and mobile glowtubes. The place was packed with people of every size, shape, sex and genetic line pushing and bustling to get around. And it was noisy. Blaring music overlapped with over-amplified hawker-calls, hysterical shrieking, blackboardfingernail scrapes, random explosions, hyper-bic-annoying jingles and a cacophony of bells, beeps, whistles and klaxons.

  ‘This is more like it!’ shouted Dielle, excited. ‘I wondered where everyone was. I guess most people spend a lot of time in the night sections, huh?’

  ‘No, not especially, it’s just the way The Strip was designed,’ Kiki shouted back, pulling him through a torrent of people. ‘More like a street thing back on Earth. All the tube vexes come out onto walkways. No dedicated access points, so you’re forced to get off and find where you want to go on foot. One of the problems with the private tube ports we have at home is that unless you deliberately go into public areas, you hardly ever see anyone. So the designers retroed to this type of environment – makes for more random interaction. It’s called social engineering.’

  Dielle immediately felt at home. He looked up. A floating platform eclipsed the sky, its underside lighting up the faces of the people below with a scene from an actionsume. When he looked at it he could hear the voices of the performers and the sound effects clearly, but the moment he looked away the sound faded into the background. The platform moved on to reveal a cross-hatch of lights high above: DownSideUp at play.

  Kiki dragged him into a smaller laneway off the main thoroughfare. Silence surrounded them like a soft cloak. A dim light illuminated the unmarked door of the club Sis had been directing her to. They entered a narrow reception corridor lined with changing rooms and heard the sound of a spirited crowd coming from the far end where a handsome blond man in a white three-piece suit intercepted them.

  TorryTown was the centre of excellence for live music onSlab and Rick’s Bar was one of the clubs that had been there for so long that it wasn’t even reconfigurable. The tiered rows of tables with their semicircles of plush seating and red tasseled table-lights had been replaced more than thirty times during the club’s history, always with exact replicas of the originals, which were themselves exact replicas of a club that had only existed on a film set long before mankind had discovered escape velocity. You knew you had made it as a musician when you had a regular gig in one of the top clubs in TorryTown and you knew you had made it as a music aficionado when you were allowed into a club like Rick’s Bar.

  ‘I’m sorry, but we have no reservation for any Pundechan or Dielle,’ the white suited man said without any discernible nuance. ‘Are you perhaps guests of an existing patron?’

  ‘Fingerz Jeez told me to mention his name,’ said Dielle, stepping toward him.

  ‘Please don’t come any closer, sir,’ said the vexman, showing Dielle the palm of his white glove. ‘We have a transparent vex at this entrance that is not yet configured for your transit.’

  Dielle backed off fast. He hadn’t forgotten his last bloody nose.

  ‘Mr Marley is performing tonight, but he hasn’t made any guest requests and he’s not responding to my pings. I’m sorry sir, madam, but unless . . . ’

  ‘Do you know who you are talking to?’ snarled Kiki.

  Blondie gave her a withering look. ‘Madam, do you think there is the slightest possibility that I don’t?’

  ‘Well, do something!’ Kiki was obviously not accustomed to being delayed. She muttered under her breath: ‘Bloody Uppies! Think they’re better than us.’

  ‘I have dispatched a club runner to find Mr Marley. Apparently he is not currently on the premises and has dropped off system presence awareness.’

  ‘Dropped off?’ said Dielle, surprised. ‘I didn’t know you could do that.’

  ‘All the night sections have dead zones, sir. Many people come here for that sole purpose.’

  ‘Well override it then!’ ordered Kiki. ‘You can’t imprison us here just because some deadbeat muso is so out of his head he forgot to put our names on his guest list. Do you know where we were today? The presidential box at the skimmer races!’

  ‘Madam, you are not imprisoned, you are free to turn around and leave the club.’ He held her fuming gaze with no perceptible emotion. ‘And I am free to initiate a lateral vex translation if you should choose to stay where you are and continue to behave like a spoiled Sider brat.’

  ‘WHAT?’ raged Kiki, banging her fists against the invisible barrier. ‘I’ll have your job on a fucking stick you nobrain windfarming trashgene leafblowing son of a b. . . ’

  And then they were outside again, expelled by an unseen moving wall like a plunger in a syringe.

  ‘That was fun!’ said Dielle, laughing. ‘You really taught him a lesson.’

  Kiki threw him an angry look, breathing heavily.

  ‘You know you look really sexy when you’re angry,’ said Dielle, getting close.

  She fell asleep in his arms on the way home. Dielle looked down on her flushed face and gently stroked her hair. He replayed the day’s events in his head.

  [[•]]

  {[?]}

  [[You are accessing recent events, do you wish to see highlights of your day’s activity?]]

  {[I can do that?]}

  [[Of course. However, I don’t have a reliable behavioural heuristogram for your diary review so I’ll use average preferences for a male of your bio-age]]

  {[OK, but leave out the falling off the mountain bit, will you?]} He’d seen that too many times already.

  As he watched a fast edit of his day, a thought occurred to him. {[Can I contact Louie?]}

  [[He is currently in full privacy mode. Do you want to leave a message?]]

  {[Can you just let him know that I want to see him?]}

  [[••]]

  {[Can you tell me where he’s been and what he’s been doing?]}

  [[All of Louis Drago’s activities since he left your presence are completely locked down and embargoed]]

  {[That’s a bit unusual isn’t it?]}

  [[••]]

  Dielle couldn’t be sure but he thought he sensed an overtone in that affirmative ping, like a different flavour of thought. Something was definitely going on. He needed to piece a few things together. He needed some more advice, and he suspected it was probably the kind of advice he could only get in a dead zone. But first, he thought, as he watched himself getting energetic with Kiki in a dark corner of a TorryTown alley, he needed to get some sleep.

  seventeen

  Louis Clinton Drago had been born in
to a broken world. Exactly eighty years later, during the Bacchanalian extremes of his farewell party, just before his body was ceremonially placed into cryonic suspension, he reflected on the fact that he’d done absolutely nothing in his entire life to fix it. He couldn’t have cared less.

  He’d grown up in a place called the Bronx; an old fashioned, mainly residential suburb of what later became the upper-eastern googopolis of the North American continent. Despite, or maybe because of the fact that he was short and not particularly good looking, he had lived a varied and sybaritic life. Married three times and divorced twice, his last wife, twenty years his junior, had run off with his mistress’s son when he was sixty-four. He didn’t give a damn.

  He’d fathered two children, which was the maximum he qualified for no matter how many times he married, but neither of his daughters nor any of his former wives would talk to him other than through paid intermediaries or with a lawyer present. He didn’t care about that either.

  Known throughout his neighbourhood for his intrusive energy, acerbic wit, business acuity and loud mouth, he’d lived the last forty years of his first life in an ostentatious house he’d had built over the bulldozed remains of the grocer’s shop he was born above. He had driven the bulldozer himself.

  He had worked hard and played even harder. By the time he was seventy-five he was pornographically wealthy, had visited everywhere he had any desire to visit, had experienced as many risky and thrilling experiences as he could endure and had variously drunk, eaten or inhaled as many legal, semi-legal or wildly illegal substances as his robust constitution could tolerate. He literally had been there, seen it, done it and stubbornly refused to buy any t-shirts, postcards or anything that would ever require dusting.

  Louie couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t become a hologram sooner. He never got tired or hungry and had no bodily functions to tend to. He felt no pain or discomfort; in fact, he felt nothing at all, no gravity, no temperature, no body mass to haul around and feed with energy and no air pressure bearing down on him. Feeling nothing felt great.