Slabscape : Reset Read online

  eleven

  Erik asked Louie if he would like to take a private tour to see ‘how magnificent their conveyance was’.

  ‘You said you were in a hurry,’ said Louie.

  ‘Yes sir,’ Erik smiled like he had an ulcer. ‘I was in a hurry to remove you from your own presence.’

  ‘You’re the man!’ said Louie. ‘Lead on. You know, I can’t understand it, I wasn’t a jerk like that when I was his age. Something’s happened to me.’

  As they strolled through the park, Erik greeted everyone by name, usually with a deferential touch to the brim of his hat. Occasionally he would say something relevant or personal, as though they were old friends. Erik introduced Louie as a new arrival onSlab and the SlabCitizens treated them both with respect. No-one seemed bothered by Louie’s semi-corporal manifestation.

  ‘Nice people,’ said Louie after a typically pleasant encounter with a young couple who’d been playing Frisbee with an eye-controlled manoeuvrable disk. ‘You know everyone, huh?’

  ‘I have never met these citizens before. Of the current 31,878,256 living humans onSlab I have personally met less than 0.223 percent.’ He looked at Louie soberly, ‘I don’t get out much.’

  ‘They seemed to know you.’

  ‘By convention, all system avatars are called Erik and all Eriks have access to every level of Slabdata on the biomass and therefore know more about each individual than do their closest friends.’

  ‘What’s the biomass?’

  ‘It’s a friendly term we use to refer to our honoured guests to whom we are merely protectors and servants. Humans make up the vast majority of the sentient biological mass onSlab.’

  ‘I guess that excludes me then,’ said Louie.

  ‘Have no fear, sir, we NAHs respect all manifestations of intelligence.’ He paused. ‘And humans too.’

  Louie figured he was being given a none-too-subtle message and winked at Erik, who responded with a barely perceptible nod. Well, thought Louie, we’re all lads together here, aren’t we?

  ‘I have to warn you, sir, that my task is to introduce you to SlabCouncil and that has the potential to be a rather perplexing experience.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Council is a combination of NAHs working in conjunction with the SlabWide Integrated System alongside a statutory number of interns who are non-corporal human consciousnesses. It was mandated in the Initial Design that humans must play a significant role in all decision making, strategic planning and philosophical debate.’

  ‘Causes problems, huh?’

  ‘Usually, sir,’ said Erik gravely, ‘it’s a total bloody disaster.’

  ‘I bet. We had a lot of that type of thing in my day, you know. You should have witnessed the negotiations between us and the U.S. and Mexican governments when they tried to claim territorial rights over Arizona Bay.’

  ‘I was reading up on the transcripts, sir. You are somewhat of a legend in our little group.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ said Louie, preening. ‘That’s dupe. It’s nice to know I’m remembered so many years after I turned into a popsicle. What type of group is it?’

  ‘Many of us are students of the century prior to Slab's departure. You were privileged to have lived through the most rapidly occurring scientific advances and cultural changes ever recorded in human history. The social disruptions brought about by technological developments were wide-ranging and traumatic. Absolutely fascinating. In fact there are some who suggest that you were a significant influence upon that most turbulent of times.’

  ‘Well, we did some stuff!’ beamed Louie, trying, and failing, to be modest.

  ‘Indeed you did, sir.’ They walked onto the perimeter invispane and Louie looked down at the lush countryside far below.

  ‘Wow!’ said Louie, impressed. ‘Anti-grav, right?’

  ‘Correct, sir.’

  ‘We invented that, you know.’

  ‘Yes, sir, although there is some debate in our circle about the use of the word invent when it comes to a lot of the claimed intellectual property of your corporation.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Louie with a grin, ‘Milus Blondel was the biggest bullshitter I’ve ever met – and I’ve met more than a few, I can tell you. He was also the luckiest son-of-a-bitch. All that matter-transmission stuff was a total accident you know.’

  ‘Yes sir, the irony of him meeting his end in the California Disappearance did not escape us. We would be honoured if you would come and talk to us about your experiences and would happily reimburse you for your time. Perhaps we could even provide valuable information in return? A bargain could be struck!’ Erik looked mischievous and Louie knew he’d just been thrown some bait. What he didn’t know yet was just how delicious that bait might be, but he was pretty sure that he, Louis Clinton Drago, business gurulla, would be able to leverage it for all it was worth.

  ‘Sure, no problem,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘I can talk for days. How many people in this group of yours?’

  ‘As of this moment, 34,542 sir.’ It was Erik’s turn to feign modesty. He walked through the transvex portal giving Louie a brief moment of panic which he dismissed when he remembered he was a holographic projection and couldn’t be hurt. Or so he thought.

  ‘Peristaltic gravity propulsion, sir,’ said Erik calmly as they hurtled to the floor at barely subsonic speeds. ‘A network of a hundred and twenty million kilometres of multilevel interconnected tubes and causeways which serve as SlabWide transportation. Each individual is delivered to their chosen destination via routes determined by traffic flow and tube capacity. Momentum compensators absorb the accelerations.’

  ‘Another one of ours,’ said Louie. He looked around at the crowds of people and animated bubbles. ‘Though I don’t think we got it working this well.’

  ‘We have made some improvements to the original design, I believe. Of course, as neither you nor I are subject to momentum restrictions, we can move around at considerably faster speeds if we need to.’ As he said this, they rose into a space above the travelling throng and accelerated to a speed that turned everything around them into a blur. ‘I want to show you the mass input and conversion zone before we arrive at Council. It might help you get a valuable perspective on our world and, in any case, they are currently debating the interpretation of the record of the last meeting and that could take hours. Days even.’ He sighed wearily. ‘I suspect you would rather walk back to Brooklyn than be involved in all that.’

  ‘Yeah, sounds about right,’ said Louie. Some things never change, he thought. ‘Hey, how is my old home town these days? Are you still in touch?’

  ‘Unfortunately not, the telepaths lost touch with Earth about eighty of your years post-departure. The time-dilation effect made it unworkable. We were sending messages as normal but the gaps between sending and receiving made the information irrelevant. Although telepathic communication is instantaneous, they would take hours to respond and those hours turned into days at our end. We would read back the message for confirmation and they would have forgotten all about us.’ Louie nodded. He had no idea what Erik was talking about. ‘We used to intercept some very outdated narrowcasts too, sir, but after we changed course, even those stopped.’

  ‘Changed course?’

  ‘Nothing sinister about it, sir. Just more accurate information came in about our destination and we altered course accordingly. Don’t believe what you’ll hear in the scandals.’ Erik looked bored. ‘It will be several minutes before we are there, sir. Would you like a brief audio-visual overview of our environment?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Louie. A privacy field surrounded them, the lights dimmed and a holographic image of Slab started playing.

  ‘Welcome to Slab,’ said an irritating male voice, over music that reminded Louie of cheap hotels. He watched, spellbound. By the time the pair arrived at their destination Louie had gained a general overview of Slab and its systems. The privacy shield dropped to reveal a side-on view of a blue-shifted galactic core.
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br />   ‘Woah!’ said Louie. ‘Are we in space? Like outside?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Welcome to the leading edge.’

  Louie stared ahead. He’d just learned that they were travelling at incredible speeds, but he couldn’t see anything that supported this. Before them lay a seemingly stationary panorama of the Milky Way and the Universe beyond. It was orders of magnitude more impressive than the Hubbles he had pored over as a child. If he had still been able to breathe, the view would have taken his breath away. Of course, he thought, if I could still breathe, I’d be dead. Dead, irradiated and frozen solid. For all of its magnificent grandeur, the environment he was floating in was the most hostile to life in the known universe.

  He looked back. All he could see was black, impenetrable darkness. A flash of light caught his eye. ‘What was that?’ he asked, pointing to the fading embers of a violent explosion in the centre of the Slabface.

  ‘That’s the focus of the gravnet funnel, sir. What you saw was some small mass being steered into the central collector and accelerated to Slabspeed. We project gravity fields which divert anything within a million kilometres down into the gravity well on the Slabface. As you are aware, Slab uses gravity drives both fore and aft. The aft ones are anti-grav thrusters and the forward ones, here, are enhanced gravitational attractors which are currently tuned to the central mass of the galaxy. You will no doubt recall that the gravity drive equations relate power to mass so that the ship’s acceleration is proportional to mass accretion. Basically, the more mass we capture along the way, the faster we should go. We have increased Slabmass by over twenty times since we departed Earth orbit and have attained a speed that is now within five percent of light-speed. But there’s a problem.’

  Louie was used to problems. He’d spent his entire life overcoming problems, especially the type of problems other people had told him were impossible. He really liked those kinds of problems. He suspected, though, that Erik was about to describe a problem he couldn’t even begin to solve.

  ‘Our current status,’ said Erik, as a stray speck of interstellar dust streaked toward the mass collector interface and disintegrated, ‘is that we’ve virtually stopped accelerating. The drive techs can’t figure out why but we seem to have hit a curve of diminishing returns. It’s looking like the light-speed barrier is impenetrable after all. Of course, the Rellies are driving us crazy about this.’

  ‘I think there’s been a bit of a mistake,’ said Louie. ‘I know we invented this anti-gravity tech, but I was the money guy. I was the one who exploited our I.P. and handled negotiations and licensing arrangements. I know zip about the science. I barely understood what the hell I was making the deals about.’

  ‘That’s not why I brought you here, sir. We know who you are.’

  Uh-oh, thought Louie.

  ‘I’m sure we’ll solve that problem eventually. It is just science after all,’ said Erik. ‘We have a much bigger problem we’re hoping you might help us with.‘ He moved them away from the mass collector and its silent, spasmodic explosions.

  They sped across the face, beyond the edge and away from Slab. Behind them, two parallel lines defined a perfectly flat sidewall that stretched back for more than a thousand kilometres. It shimmered blackly, against the blackness of receding space. Louie hoped that whatever technology was holding them in place was fool-proof, or better still, genius-proof.

  ‘Look towards our destination, sir, if you please,’ said Erik, pointing forwards. ‘Can you see a dark spot in front of us?’

  Louie looked at the concentration of stars ahead. He raised his hand instinctively to shield his eyes from the glare of the galactic core, then realised what he was doing and sheepishly dropped his arm. ‘Holographic hands,’ he muttered. He could make out a shape. A dark shape. An angular dark shape. It looked just like . . .

  ‘What the fuck?’ he said, turning to the forlorn facsimile of a long-dead president floating in space.

  Erik nodded grimly.

  ‘But it . . . it can’t be . . . it’s not . . .’ Louie was unaccustomed to being flustered. He couldn’t remember the last time anything had happened to surprise him enough to make him miss a beat. Even when most of the State of California and almost all of his company’s assets and executives had disappeared in one cataclysmic instant and the Pacific Ocean had rolled into the newly formed Arizona Bay, all he had done was smile. Smile and triple-check that the transactions divesting himself of his major shareholding in IRAK had cleared the week before.

  But this was something that had definitely renewed his respect in the ability of the universe to throw curve balls.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is, sir. It’s an artefact identical to this one.’ Erik swept his hand over the 53 million cubic kilometres of Slab pushing the barriers of the space-time continuum silently behind them. ‘As far as we can ascertain it’s another spaceship, directly ahead of us, matching our course and speed and it is exactly . . .’ Erik paused for effect and repeated the word, ‘exactly the same as this one. It is the same size in every dimension, has the same external detailing, the same material structure, the same configuration of drives, the same communication arrays and the same insignia. Our probes cannot get within 1000 klicks of it before they are vaporised by the shield defences, but then our own Slab has exactly the same defence capability and barriers. However, there have been no communications emanating from it, no responses to any of our hails. In fact, with the exception of the automated defence attacks on our probes, it appears to be completely oblivious to our presence.’

  Louie looked at the dark shape ahead. Now that he knew what it was, he could clearly make out the Slablike geometric outline silhouetted against the stars.

  ‘Every remote test we have been able to carry out indicates it is inert. There is no measurable heat radiation and no vibrational signature which would be typical of an inhabited ship. Therefore, we speculate, it is abandoned, empty and lifeless. A veritable Mary Celeste. We have only two possible explanations: either, it is a replica of our own Slab made by some other civilisation – an alien species far more technically advanced than our own who decided to build a copy of Slab and manoeuvre it into a precise matching course ahead of us, perhaps to provoke us into paranoia or possibly even as a form of joke.’

  ‘Or?’ Louie was clearly not buying that option.

  ‘It is Slab.’

  ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘Quite so sir; as you say sir. Absolutely impossible. But there’s going to be a bit of a flap about this if it ever gets out. Which is why I have been authorised to tell you that if you utter one word about this to anyone outside Council, your communications facility will be shut down before you have formed the shape of your second syllable. Sorry, but we can confidently predict that the mere knowledge of its existence among the biomass would spark a widespread panic at the very least.’

  ‘You’d better take me to meet this council of yours Erik,’ said Louie seriously. Jeez! he thought, first they tell me there’s no basketball and now this.

  They hurtled back to a tiny square of blue on the Slabface. Despite the bizarre news, he had enjoyed his first EVA. It was so much easier to be disembodied, he thought. Hard vacuum was a piece of . . . .

  ‘Hey,’ he said, turning back to Erik. ‘How come I can hear you speak?’

  ‘How do you mean, sir?’

  ‘Well, you know, sound, air, in space no-one can hear you sneeze, that type of thing.’

  ‘You are presuming, sir, that you have normally functioning ears.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Louie. ‘Good point.’

  As they entered the portal and went transonic, Sis emtied six million tonnes of lead shielding into the tube behind them.

  twelve

  Dielle spent most of his day following one of Kiki’s recommended routes. He bounded through a forest of hundred-meter-tall zigzag trees in Mitchell SideUp. High above, a canopy of white wingleaves beat lazily against the local one-sixth gravity. The leaves held
the slender trees upright and made them tremble like taut springs. Ranks of right-angled trunks quivered in sympathy, creating interference patterns that rippled into the distance.

  He tumbled down white-water rapids inside a privacy field that absorbed every blow as he bounced off the mirrorrock canyon walls like a pachinko ball in a race to the sink-hole.

  The contextureality corridor was mind-blowing. Literally. It was a 300Km long, full-scale representation of the history of humankind - in context. The context was provide by Sis who fed him intensive data cascades that blew away his recently gained concept of reality and replaced it with a detailed understanding of the technology and circumstances of the moment in history he’d been transported to - in his case, Kiki’s itinerary took him to mid-fifteenth-century Germany. He was awed by the implications of the invention of hand-cast moveable type. He realised that information which had previously been the exclusive domain of the church and state would become available to everyone. Barely educated people would learn to read. Everything would change. As the temporary reality faded from his brain, Dielle re-remembered that nobody bothered reading the printed word anymore and learned a very important point: context is everything.

  But when it came to being impressed, as far as Dielle was concerned, nothing compared to the Allways Falls, a fifty-kilometre-wide curved curtain of water that plunged thousands of feet into a churning lake. The noise was deafening and there was an energy in the air that exhilarated him. Lightning flashed between erupting spumes of mist and hundreds of rainbows flickered in and out of existence, forming corridors of parallel arches between the lake and the falls. Dielle queried where all the water came from, so Sis manoeuvred his privacy field further along the arc to where the water surged upwards. White-walled spirals formed at the turbulent interface between the opposing torrents, curling into tight whirlpools that span away across the face of the water like angry sprites.