Slabscape : Reset Read online

  He took a mouthful of the cool liquid, reconsidered his assumption and threw up all over the shiny black counter top.

  ‘What the fu . . . ’

  {[What is this?]}

  [[You asked me to recommended you a drink. Your current bio-analysis shows fatigue poisons and low electrolytes. This drink will serve to replenish those and add a few extra essential trace elements]]

  The morfit hurried through the doorway, deploying an array of telescopic cleaning tools.

  {[It tastes bloody awful]}

  [[••]]

  OK, he thought, he wasn’t going to change his assumption. He just needed to learn how to ask better questions.

  {[Gimme something that’ll do all that and taste great too, something that other people enjoy]}

  [[Cooler]]

  This time the panel slid open to reveal a glass of sparkling amber liquid filled with citrus fruit and rimmed with a variety of healthy looking edibles. That’s more like it, he thought, taking a sip. ‘Delicious,’ he said, returning to the lounge and the sunken couches.

  {[I need some help here]}

  [[What do you need?]]

  {[I need to find out a load of stuff that I don’t know but I don’t know what questions to ask]}

  [[General subject?]]

  {[Well, Slab for a start. Can you tell me about this place and some stuff you think I ought to know?]}

  [[Suggest Slab newbie routine, levels one through five. Options [more] and [stop] anytime]]

  {[Fine, go ahead]}

  [[What?]]

  {[Sorry. Proceed]}

  The large flower arrangement in the centre vanished and was replaced by an image of a dark obelisk. Brash, orchestral pomp faded in, followed by a smiley mouthed male narration.

  ‘Welcome to Slab, or, as we used to call it, the Joint Earth Council Galactic Conveyor ISS.001.000.0001, the most advanced human-conceived, machine-made, mobile habitat in all the known universes. This tour is designed to familiarise you with your home and many of the facilities that exist within it. Life onSlab is an abundance of fulfilment opportunities tailored precisely to each SlabCitizen’s needs. We know you’re going to enjoy a long and healthy life exploring the myriad possibilities of our fabulous home, so let’s start with some of the basics.’

  Over the next few hours he learned of many things. One of the first was that an hour wasn’t an hour anymore. As soon as the ship had departed Earth orbit, the media corporations, eager to extend their most profitable prime-time slots, had lobbied hard to have shipboard time decimalised. The SlabDay was altered to ten hours of a hundred minutes each. A minute was comprised of a hundred seconds but because seconds had stayed the same length as Earth seconds (in order to prevent a mass boycott from the physicists), the SlabDay wound up being a little over fifteen percent longer than an Earth day. The length of the working day stayed the same (in order to prevent a mass boycott by everyone else), so all of the extra time was, in media terms, super-prime. Weeks and months were consigned to history. Days were identified by numbers instead of names and a hundred days made a cycle. One Earth year was the equivalent of a fraction over three cycles but despite this, and just because it made everything that bit more complicated, everyone still measured their biological ages in Earth years. An Earth no-one would ever see again.

  Slab was on a one-way trip. A trip that was probably going to take over twenty thousand Earth years or sixty-five kilocykes in deciTime. The reason for the voyage was to lodge a formal complaint, in person. Sending a message would have taken almost twice as long and was considered to be a waste of time anyway. It was universally acknowledged that if you really wanted something done, you had to turn up and complain face to face (or whatever the non-corporal equivalent of a face turned out to be). No-one, not even a non-physical collective conscious entity, was going to ignore you if you turned up on its doorstep after a twenty-thousand-light-year journey. Or so it was hoped.

  It had also been hoped that the journey wouldn’t have taken quite so long, but unfortunately, Slab, which was now travelling at about ninety-five percent of lightspeed, had all but stopped accelerating. This was irritating a lot of people because they had assumed that someone would have figured out faster-than-light transportation by now, but nobody had. The gravity drives had reached maximum thrust hundreds of cykes earlier and it no longer made any difference how much more mass they took on during the journey, the increase in velocity was almost imperceptible.

  One school of thought held that the problem was ultimately a question of philosophy rather than physics and that in order to transcend lightspeed, Slab’s human cargo would have to believe in concepts involving multi-dimensional, unbelievably small and impossible-to-measure, vibrating filaments of pure energy as the basic building blocks of the universe. No sane person could accept this idea with a straight face, so the speed of light was smugly intransigent. Philosophy, of sorts, was also connected with the reason for the journey in the first place.

  They were heading for the MacGoughin Sequester, a dull and somewhat anonymous region of the Milky Way which was, as far as could be ascertained, the origin of the alien consciousness which had infested human minds for eons and was responsible for virtually all of mankind’s existential anxieties. Humanity had had enough of the whole ‘duality of man’ torment and was determined to seek out whatever it was that lived in this Dice-forsaken section of the galaxy and give it a very serious talking to.

  Dielle repeatedly asked Sis for more information.

  The human consciousness problem had been ignored for centuries on Earth largely because most of its early history had been dominated by religious organisations who benefited hugely by promoting mysterious explanations over rational ones. No-one, under pain of excommunication, eternal damnation or worse, had been allowed to investigate the truth. However as a more rational, scientific approach gradually displaced superstition and fear, hundreds of experiments were conducted to determine exactly what happened when people died. Eventually, in the mid twenty-first century, it was proved that energy was leaving the physical body at the point of death and heading away from Earth. Years of research coupled with the extraordinary sacrifice of the MacGoughin twins produced telemetric data which confirmed a world-shattering conclusion: every single energy transmission was directed to the same point, a region of space approximately 20,000 light-years nearer the centre of the galaxy.

  The media had a field day – in fact, a field year. Headlines proclaimed the discovery of the origin of the soul and the soul planet, which was instantly called Home, citing the fact that humanity had never called Earth home, choosing instead to name it after the basic dirt from which it was formed. Pundits were confident that being able to scientifically lay the blame for the struggle between good and evil on an alien infestation heralded the end of virtually all of the world’s religions. Many people who had encountered what was termed a near-death experience suddenly went public saying that when they had said they were travelling down a dark corridor toward a light, what they had actually meant was that they had been zooming through empty space toward a brilliantly lit planet. Going toward the light. Going Home. Everything started to make sense.

  However, the world’s major religions had far too much at stake to take the news kneeling down. Huge resources were diverted into further scientific research aimed at proving human consciousness was separate from the human soul. An entire new industry of theolographic P.R. companies sprang up to promote the idea that the newly discovered consciousness energy was measurable proof of the existence of God/Gods/Prophets/Tulkus and/or Divine Instruments (depending on where the research sponsorship came from). Pressure was brought to bear. The scientists who had been measuring the dying energy vectors publicly denied they had ever said human consciousness had anything to do with the soul.

  Organised religions became truly organised for the first time. They pragmatically brushed aside millennia’s worth of spilled bad blood and joined forces, formed dummy corporations, pooled assets and
covertly took control of all of the world’s media. The public were deluged with information and bombarded by TV programs, feature films, magazine articles and even comic strips all featuring theo-scientific experts using very long, often completely made-up words targeted at rubbishing the idea of a soul-filled home planet. The public did what the they always did. They got bored.

  As soon as the public’s attention had been diverted, an expedition was instigated and the interstellar spaceship that was to eventually become Slab sprang from blueprint to orbital construction. Originally, the ship had a drive section, a life support section and one large habitable section stacked as a series of themed floors, like a city-sized skyscraper. The ship used a gravity drive, or more accurately, an anti-gravity/gravity drive and was designed to continually take on mass during the voyage. The theory stated that as the ship became ever more massive, the drives would become more powerful and the acceleration would increase. It worked just as predicted for a couple of hundred years, then it tailed off. As the ship approached the speed of light they had virtually stopped accelerating.

  One hundred and twenty cycles ago, it had been decided that after the opening of the new AllWeather section, Slab design would be frozen and the expansion phase would be complete. SlabMedia was referring to this event as coming out of Beta.

  Everyone was looking forward to AllWeather opening. The promotional material showed mountain ranges and ski resorts, buildings carved from ice and log cabins laced with snow. There were deserts, rainforests, swamps, safari trails and clear blue seas with long, sun-drenched beaches. Above all there were sunsets. No-one had ever seen a real sunset before. AllWeather was going to have a moving sun simulator which was designed to recreate both dawns and sunsets in a range of sponsored colours.

  Each section of Slab had a different climate and character. Dielle was currently in Seacombe, the oldest of the day sections; approximately 355 kilometres wide, 200 kilometres long and 14 kilometres high. Its climate was the one which most people felt was invigorating and positive: early spring. And since it was such a nice day, he thought he should go out and explore a little.

  {[Stop. Can you direct me to Jenny’s?]}

  [[Follow flashing yellow squares]]

  A display of aromatic flowers replaced the sume and a small flashing yellow square appeared on the glass panel which opened silently as he walked toward it. About a hundred metres away, hovering above a group of sculpted bushes, was another yellow square.

  Jenny’s was a single-story building with an elevated view over the local form. Dielle looked up at the jolly sign on its roof.

  [[Jenny’s]]

  {[I know]}

  [[Cancelling auto-read for roman characters. Assume you still require auto-translate for non Ænglish?]]

  {[••]}

  This Jenny’s was one of over two thousand almost identical Jenny’s restaurants onSlab. The original Jenny, who had insisted on describing herself as just a waitress, had been born on Earth and had become stupendously rich simply by being a really, really good waitress.

  As he entered the diner, a hyper-attractive, happy young woman floated toward him as if she were on wheels, but as he checked out her smiling face, glossy hair, full breasts, slender waist, tight ass, long legs and delicate feet he realised she wasn’t on wheels at all. By this time, however, he’d had such a pleasant experience he’d forgotten why he was looking at her shoes.

  ‘Hi Dielle, how are you today?’ she asked, using the mandatory Jenny’s patented smile.

  ‘Fine, I guess. How’d you know my name?’

  ‘Well Sis told me, but I knew it already of course! How are you settling in, honey? You want something to eat? Sit over here, it’s our best spot.’ She guided him, smoothly, to a booth. ‘I know you just got here too, so I want to give you a real special welcome to Jenny’s,’ she purred, using smile number thirty-one, extra sparkle.

  ‘Are you Jenny?’ asked Dielle, feeling special already.

  ‘Why no, honey. She went on ahead a long time ago, but I do admire her so. She was my idol when I was just a little girl. I used to tell myself that one day I’d have a Jenny’s all of my own and here I am! Little old me!’

  Little wasn’t the word which had sprung to the front of Dielle’s mind.

  ‘You can call me Mary-Belle or Bella, or just plain old Bee.’ Plain was another word that hadn’t even come close to surfacing in Dielle’s thoughts. This was a girl with a lot of valuable personal assets as far as Dielle could tell. Not at all like Kiki, more like a . . . more like a . . . what? He couldn’t find a word for it.

  ‘So how hungry are you, Dielle honey? You want to tell me what you want, or do you want me to bring you something really good that I just know you’re going to enjoy a whole lot?’

  Dielle smiled back and tried some serious eye contact. ‘Yeah, that sounds good. Whatever you think.’

  ‘Yewgardit!’ she said and slid off to greet a pair of customers who had just arrived. Probably a couple of guys, thought Dielle. Or perhaps two women who liked to wear identical serious-looking uniforms which flattened their chests and hid their faces under peaked caps. He couldn’t make out what they were saying but Mary-Belle was giving them the full welcome treatment in a language he didn’t understand. She seated them, slid off to a rear section of the diner and returned to Dielle’s table with a plate of steaming food in less time than it took him to ask Sis what language they were speaking.

  [[Modified German]]

  ‘There you go honey, these are what I call Bella’s all-day-any-day pancakes. I made them myself to a personal secret recipe.’

  He doubted that very much. She couldn’t have been out of his sight for more than fifteen seconds, tops. He dug in. They were delicious.

  ‘Ummmm! These are fantastic! I’m never going to eat anywhere else!’

  ‘Well that’s great honey, but we’ll have to clear that with your agent if that’s OK?’

  He tried to speak through a mouthful of sweet’n’sticky JennyTang sauce ‘Clear what with who?’

  ‘Oh never mind, sugar, we can do that later.’ She sat down on the other side of the table and whispered conspiratorially, ‘So, have you spoken to yourself yet?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I can only imagine. It must be really weird, yeah?’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he whispered back. He had no idea why he was whispering. Speaking to himself? A very pleasant meal had just turned slightly freaked-out.

  ‘You know, talking to your previous self. Before you reset.’

  ‘I can do that?’

  ‘Why sure. Least, I think so.’ She looked uncertain. ‘Didn’t you know?’

  Maybe that was what Kiki had meant when she said he could ask himself why he was here. If he could talk to himself before he reset that could fill in a lot of blanks.

  ‘No. How do I do that?’

  ‘Well, usually any holo-projector will do it, but you’d better ask Sis, maybe ours won’t work. You are maybe the oldest ever reset to be re-fammed you know. I don’t know if they could do that stuff in those days.’

  ‘I didn’t know that either. The oldest, huh? Let me ask Sis.’

  ‘Yewgardit!’ Bella said cheerfully as she slid off to attend to her other customers.

  {[Can I talk to my previous self?]}

  [[Yes]]

  {[More]}

  [[Your so-called previous self, that is the you before you reset who lived on Earth while Slab was being designed. He, or you, recorded a fully interactive download of his/your personality into a digital storage matrix which was transferred to SlabWide Integrated System and held in trust awaiting your successful re-fam which has now taken place. You are the only person authorised to access this data. Unfortunately, the technology for complete integration of you, or him, had not been invented then so the only way you can communicate with yourself is via voice and visual language. Sorry]]

  {[And how do I do that?]}

  [[The data is very, very old; it is no
t compatible with modern onSlab holographic projection systems. You will need to use an old fashioned portable vDek unit]]

  {[And how do I get one of those?]} Dielle was getting slightly impatient with all of this, was it him, or was Sis being a little reluctant to tell him something he really thought he should have been made aware of earlier?

  [[Your waitress is bringing you a vDek now]]

  ‘Oh, I haven’t seen one of these in ages!’ said Bella as she placed a small silver cylinder with two opposing vertical slits in the middle of the table. She turned it so that one of the slits faced him.

  Dielle peered at it. ‘What is it? What does it do?’

  ‘It’s a portable holo-projector; people used to use them to have face-to-face conversations. You sit here and you see the person you want to talk to over there.’ She nodded toward the opposite side of his table. ‘And wherever they are, they can see you the same way. Everything like that is just built-in now. You’ll have to log into it using Sis. I already tried, but it’s locked to little old you.’

  ‘OK. Thanks a lot,’ he said, hoping that Bella would leave him alone. The prospect of meeting himself had unnerved him and didn’t need any extra company. Bella got the message.

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you to have a chat then. Busy, busy, busy!’ she slid off, smoothly. He still couldn’t see any wheels, but enjoyed looking anyway.

  He took another mouthful of pancake.

  {[Ok, can you connect me with this thing?]}

  [[Specify thing]]

  {[This vDek thing that you just sent over. I want to talk to my previous self]}

  [[Are you sure?]]

  {[What th. . . ]}

  [[Intern interrupt: ‘Dielle, there is free intern advice available for this decision if you wish to accept it.’]] This came in the form of a voice, a pleasant and gentle female voice that sounded clear but matriarchal. It was the type of voice that expected to be listened to.