Slabscape : Reset Read online

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘It’s all right dear, I just have to tell you all this now so you can agree to a pre-consultation agency fee and appoint a proxy to act on your behalf until you’re in a better state to negotiate full I.P. exploitation, endorsements and representation deals.’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

  ‘There is something I have to ask you though. While the sellouts will be fine and should make you enough to keep you going for a good while, there’s a SlabWide sumecaster that’s interested in putting you out live, no edit, sensurround constant feed. What do you think?’

  ‘Everything is being recorded?’

  ‘I really can’t formally advise you . . . not yet anyway, but there’s a lot of people interested in your re-fam experience. They want to sume it live and as we never do any original resets these days, you’re a bit of a celebrity already. It’s terribly intrusive though. You don’t want to do it, do you?’ The way she asked made him think that yes would have been the wrong answer.

  He thought about this while he looked her in the eyes. He wondered how many other people there were in the world he had just been born into. He wondered whether Nurse Pundechan loved him as much as he loved her. He wondered what taxes were. He instinctively didn’t like the sound of the word. He wondered what percentage meant and if someone was trying to con him, a mere twenty-seven-years-and-three-hours-old man.

  ‘No I don’t,’ he said with a lot more conviction than he felt.

  ‘That’s good dear,’ she said cheerily. ‘We’ll get a much better deal if we play hard to get. Let them see some of the really good stuff first, sucker them in, then screw them on the affiliations, sub-licenses, merch and stimsellthrus and keep a hundred percent of the residuals! Can I assume you’re happy to let me have your proxy until you decide otherwise? You can always re-negotiate at a cycle’s notice and you really do need someone who cares about your welfare acting in your best interests.’

  ‘Nurse,’ he said. ‘I have no idea what all that meant, but I’m with you all the way!’ He was definitely warming to Kiki Pundechan. Didn’t she just say she cared about his welfare? He thought he remembered what a celebrity was too.

  {[to mygroupname inisumecast :: reset incept date 1039:96:4:22:15 affirmative decline live feed. All enquiries to official proxy negotiator and current agent kiki tiger@Pundechan Media. Start high guys, this one’s a cutie!]}

  [[••]]

  {[Note: reset incept date 1039:96:4:22:15 doName Dielle UFN. Tx agent proxy to self along with SWAMPI-4 pre-consult fee. Standard T and C, 1 cyke reneg]}

  [[••]]

  ‘OK – let’s see how you’re doing. I’m going to release your right hand.’ She pointed; ‘This is your right, by the way. You are genetically right-handed so this should be the quickest to retrain. Don’t try anything too complicated. Can you lift your hand up to your face and touch your nose?’

  He thought about where his hand was and where his face was. While he knew both these things, he found it difficult to transfer the knowledge to his arm muscles. Nothing happened.

  ‘Any hints?’

  Kiki reached into her pocket and brought out a stick with a fluffy, pink end. She reached up and tickled his nose with it. His hand flew up to his face with amazing speed.

  ‘Ow!’ he yelped. Kiki’s stick had a small sponge on the other end which she used to wipe away the tears.

  ‘Very good, dear,’ she said. ‘Right on target. Let’s try it again with a little less enthusiasm, shall we?’

  Extremity awareness training took several hours and required so much concentration that he found it difficult to talk at the same time. Kiki helped him find his various body parts with a variety of things on sticks and an easy laugh. Finally she let him have another dance before steering him back to the sleep field.

  ‘Sleep well, Dielle dear, tomorrow’s going to be your last day on the frame and you’ll need lots of energy for the back flips,’ she said, adjusting something on his panel. She called out ‘Nighty night!’ and disappeared through the wall.

  Shit! he thought, I keep forgetting to ask her how she does that.

  The next day turned out to be different from the first, primarily because he now had a memory of a day before. There was a lot more dancing, co-ordination work and complicated balancing, frequently accompanied by elaborate falling over which could have been prevented by the recovery frame, but wasn’t. After a break and more sleep, Kiki disconnected the entire upper body section of the frame. The golden skeleton was stark against the white background and far more fragile than he had imagined, especially for something powerful enough to make him perform back flips. Kiki hadn’t been joking, he’d had so much fun doing those, they had to stop several times to catch his breath because he was laughing so hard. The panel fascinated him because it had lots of colours and lines and lights and weird symbols. Kiki wouldn’t let him touch it.

  During a rest period, they sat together on the sleep field which shimmered in mid-air. Kiki massaged his hands.

  ‘You see,’ she said, ‘while you were in Regen, we grew you an extra forty-five centimetres in height, so we had to make sure everything grew in proportion, like your arms, hands, chest and well, just about everything really, and your contract had some specific body requirements too that had to be tweaked and adjusted. That’s why you might feel a few tingling sensations in your hands.’

  He already knew about tingling sensations. He reached up with his free hand and cupped it round Kiki’s left breast. Now that’s what I call a tingling sensation, he thought. Kiki stopped massaging and studied his face.

  ‘Why did you do that, Dielle?’ She spoke softly but deliberately, as though the answer were important.

  ‘Because I . . . like it?’ he said, feeling very unsure of himself.

  She looked at a couple of coloured symbols on his panel. ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘That’s quite interesting.’ She waited. Dielle did nothing. There didn’t seem anything for him to do. Something had happened but he didn’t know what.

  ‘Now, dear,’ she said slowly after a few minutes. ‘Why did you touch my breast just then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think I thought I liked it, but I have no idea why now.’

  ‘That’s fine, dear,’ she said, getting up briskly. ‘We’ll get to all that soon enough after your contemporary morality update. But don’t worry, it’ll be lookadat fine!’

  Dielle suddenly felt very alone and vulnerable. ‘This is a very strange place, Kiki,’ he said. ‘You will look after me, won’t you?’

  {[to glibGirl :: Gabs! Just a day old and he’s 20 points hot already. Told you these oldies were goodies! You free dindins ToNight SideUp? Have sumes!]}

  [[••]]

  ‘Of course I’ll look after you dear, that’s what I’m here for. Shall we try some hand-eye stuff? You won’t believe how often it’ll come in handy.’

  Most of the rest of the day involved Dielle having a lot of fun trying to catch balls and throw them back. It was hard at first, but he was a quick learner. He discovered he could make Kiki jump up to catch his throws in a way that made him feel happy and he could tell she was having as much fun as he was.

  ‘I like this body, Kiki,’ he said, a little breathlessly.

  ‘Me too darling,’ she said, red faced. ‘Better get some rest now though, so it can recover and your brain can process everything you’ve been learning. You’re doing very well dear, I’m proud of you. And tomorrow you’re going to get a new eye!’

  She was gone before he could react. What? A new eye? What was wrong with the ones he’d already got? And what was it with all this walking through walls stuff? Dammit, he must try to remember to ask that one.

  seven

  He woke from pleasant, manipulated dreams into the cool reality of his white room. His lazy reverie crumbled when he remembered something was going to happen to his eyes. He looked around the room for anything he could use as a weapon. There was nothing. Just white, feature
less walls. There was also a white, featureless ceiling and a white, featureless floor. He jumped off the sleep field and shuffled toward what he guessed was the nearest wall. If Nurse Pundechan could walk through it, maybe he could.

  ‘Dammit!’ That was the second time he’d hurt his nose. He wondered why his eyes were leaking again. Maybe they were faulty. Maybe they were the only part of him they couldn’t regenerate. What had she said on that first day? Something about not being able to do something? He put his finger in his right eye and rediscovered, with a shocking immediacy, something he thought he should have fucking well remembered in the first place. He decided that no-one was going to get anywhere near his eyes – not if he could help it. Not ever. He backed up against a corner and rolled himself up into a ball, feeling vulnerable. He wished Kiki was there. A deep instinct made him want to put his thumb in his mouth but he decided it would not only be stupid, but pointless. He did it anyway.

  ‘Ohio to you, my new old friend,’ said a peculiar male voice close to his right ear.

  Dielle flinched. He hadn’t heard anyone come into the room. ‘Keep away from me!’

  ‘Don’t tell me. Paranoid regression to foetal position in the face of an unrecognised threat. Had two resets just like you this cycle already. Don’t be frightened. There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Been sucking your thumb, too?’

  ‘No! Where’s Nurse Pundechan?’ His voice was muffled, but that could have been because his knees were covering his ears.

  ‘She’ll be right down after I’ve insinuated the new eye. She said to say hello.’

  Insinuated? He definitely didn’t like the sound of that. Of the thousands of things he was prepared to accept as a new experience that morning, he thought, insinuatedation was definitely not on the bloody list.

  ‘Who the fuck are you and why don’t you fuck right off?’

  ‘My name is Plurethaby Triathelon Dempster; you can call me PT. I’m a neural implant technician and I’m not going to go away because unless you have a functioning, legal and updated N.I., you won’t ever be allowed to leave this room. So you’d better extract your head from your arse pronto, Tonto, ’cos I charge by the deciday and the clock started running before I left home.’

  ‘What the hell is an N eye?’ Dielle asked, staying foetal.

  ‘An N.I. is a neural implant. An interface between you and System, or Sis, or Big Sister, Mum, Mother or any damn thing you want to call the thing that controls everything that surrounds you, protects you, feeds you, informs you, entertains you, deals with your garbage and keeps you alive. Believe me, primitive man, you would rather be blind than not have an eye.’

  ‘Look, I’ve only been here a couple of days. I’m finding it a bit difficult to keep up with all this stuff. It’s all a bit . . . and who the fuck are you calling primitive?’ He jerked open and was confronted by five sets of dark, round lenses peering at him from five different directions. He was just about to re-curl when he realised they were all attached to a cloth-covered helmet worn by someone with a limited social life. All of his clothing – even his footwear – was made from the same coarse, brown fabric. Everywhere Dielle looked there was a pocket with something in it or a fastening with something hanging off it. Now he didn’t feel frightened; just offended. He moved threateningly toward the intruder who wanted to steal his eyes.

  The festooned form jumped back in alarm. ‘Whoa now! Don’t take offence. Primitive is a term of endearment around here these days. You’re something of a celebrity, you know. I’ve never even met a reset who wasn’t born here.’

  He remembered. Yes, he was a celebrity, and he was being recorded too. He straightened up and attempted to look dignified. Good job he’d not sucked his thumb, he thought.

  ‘An interface between me and what? How does it work?’

  ‘Simple. It’s a meta-pico network made up of several hundred million nano devices which link the neural impulses of selected parts of your brain, nominally the medium level functions of language and numeracy, aural processing and visual perception along with knowledge-base search and acquisition functions to the system interface that is ubiquitously embedded into the infrastructure of this environment. In order for you to interact with any technology, from a shower to a fivedee sensurround sexinema, you have to have one.’ He turned to the large silver trunk which Dielle had only just noticed was behind him. It transformed into a floating bench covered with delicate looking tools.

  ‘Sexinema?’

  ‘Yeah, how old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-seven.’

  ‘And how many days?’

  ‘Two. I think.’

  ‘Sex is in a couple of days. You’ll like it’

  ‘So you don’t touch my eyes then?’

  ‘Nope, not directly. Just the standard focus-aware, augmentation and image-capture stuff, although we’ve been working on some pretty cool total visual displacers that I might be able to let you have on a reduced fee, seeing as they’re still in alpha.’

  Dielle ignored this last comment. He was quickly getting used to ignoring things this strange person said. ‘So what do you do to give me a new eye? Is it painful?’

  ‘Nopey dokey, doc. You won’t feel a thing. In fact the interior of the brain doesn’t have any pain receptors at all – not like your nose, eh?’ he pointed at Dielle’s face.

  ‘How’d you know about that?’ he asked.

  ‘Here’s a tip: You can always tell a man who’s walked into a locked transvex by the tiny trickle of blood from the nostril.’ He moved his multi-eyed helmet up to Dielle’s face. ‘Smarts, don’t it?’

  Blood? He wiped his nose with the back of his finger and looked down. The smear of crimson red liquid on it looked amazing. Wow! he thought, red is such a fantastic colour. He stood and studied it for a while, taking in the richness of the scarlet stain, slowly turning brown against the white background of his world. After some time he realised the guy with the glasses had assembled something that looked like a multi-legged mechanical web.

  ‘Now, if you’d just like to put this on your head, we’ll be through in a jiffety whiff.’

  ‘You can’t seriously expect me to put my head in that thing, can you? What the hell is it?’

  ‘It’s a neural implant manipulator – it telefuses the N.I. into exactly the right synapses of your brain. It has to be accurate to within a nanometer so it needs to be pretty firmly attached to your old nodle. See?’ he said, holding up the glistening implement proudly. ‘Look, these things zero in on your frontal lobe and scan the interior of your brain to tune into the parts of the cortex that link to the interlingual conduits; these are remote probes that specialise in the math processors and these little fellas at the back fuse into the visual and aural pathways to enhance the standard but sorrowfully inadequate input interfaces you inherited from some extinct simian millions of years ago.’

  ‘You are not exactly filling me with confidence.’

  ‘Look, it’s no problem, really. Tell you what, I’ll just semi-fuse the aural one in and you can see how it feels, if you don’t like it, I’ll take it right out again, no charge.’

  ‘If it hurts me, I’ll pound on your nose with my hands really hard.’

  ‘No need for that,’ he said brightly. ‘You won’t feel a thing. Just put this over your head – it auto-locates to your specific internal brain topography. There you go, spiky ones at the front.’

  Dielle gingerly lifted the brain spider over his head. It immediately came alive in his hands, grabbed the top of his head and went through a vibrating dance before clamping itself tightly to his cranium. ‘Get it off me!’ he screamed, trying in vain to pry it from his skull. The harder he tore at it, the more it held on.

  [[‘Hello Dielle,’]] said a voice somewhere inside his head. [[‘Calm down dear, I won’t let anything bad happen to you.’]] It was Kiki.

  ‘Hello?’ said Dielle out loud. ‘Where are you?’

  [[‘Cool, isn’t it?’]] said Kiki in his head.

  Di
elle snarled at the N.I. technician who he thought was looking very smug for a ten-eyed lying bastard who was liable to get his nose rearranged at any moment.

  ‘You said this wouldn’t hurt,’ he complained. ‘This bloody thing’s crushing my head in!’

  ‘Look, if you don’t jerk around so much, it won’t have to clamp itself so firmly. This is very, very accurate implant location, you know. Now relax, I’ve got to locate your other centres. Think of a number.’

  ‘Seven,’ he said, impatiently.

  ‘I said think of a number, not say it. And can’t you think of a more original number? Like something with several digits?’

  Dielle thought of a number and scowled. He was getting good at scowling.

  ‘OK,’ said the techie. ‘I’m getting something. Keep concentrating on the number . . . OK . . . hang on . . . first digit: eight . . . then I’ve got five, four, seven, another eight – this is coming in fine now . . . two, two, seven, six. OK, you can stop now. You’re tuned to the numerics. The implant is transfused into the right cortex numerical processor. Got that? The right side.’

  ‘Right, right.’

  ‘Yes, I’m one of the best in the business, you know. Trained in the original Implant Development Centre. One of my professors had done this stuff by micro surgery. Can you imagine?’

  He couldn’t imagine, so he shook his head. That was a mistake; the spider clamped harder.

  A shower of highly animated, brightly coloured dots suddenly filled the room. Dielle’s eyes tried to follow everything at once, but the more he tried, the less he saw. Every time he focussed on a dot, it disappeared. Within a few seconds, they had all gone.

  ‘Right, that’s image capture sorted. OK, be very still now, this takes concentration. Language. Think of a phrase that is simple and direct. Try to imagine that you’re giving me an instruction to do something, very precisely. Hear the words in your head, but don’t vocalise them. Form them as if I can hear them.’