Slabscape: Reboot by S Spencer Baker

Author:S Spencer Baker [Baker, S Spencer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: X12
Publisher: Blip Books
Published: 2020-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

Dielle woke feeling anxious. He’d been having fear-fueled dreams for hours, all memory of which disappeared like breath in the wind the moment he woke up, leaving him panting and disoriented. He made urgent use of the bathroom facilities, recalling Fencer’s instructions, and then went looking for company and food. He found Kiki and her crew in the ship’s lounge with a pile of nutricakes between them. They were sitting around a low table with a set of candles burning in the centre and had been involved in a heated conversation that stopped the moment he entered the room.

‘Dielle darling,’ said Kiki, floating up in the reduced gravity. ‘I’d like you to meet a couple of Pundechan Media’s most trusted employees. ‘This is my right-hand person and executive producer, Jam.’

Jam scowled. ‘Dice, are we going to do this again?’ He’d been unenthusiastic about using pseudonyms during their first meeting—a meeting that had been wiped from Dielle’s memory during the re-calibration of his sub-legal stim unit.

Kiki shot daggers at him as he nodded, sullenly, to Dielle.

‘And this my right-, left-, upper- and lower-hand master editor, Ed.’

Ed stood up, revealing two extra sets of arms protruding from his muscular chest. Dielle had met a prosthete before, but that guy had only one extra pair of arms.

‘Whoa, that’s impressive,’ said Dielle. ‘Which one do I shake?’

‘Try this one,’ said Ed, sticking out his upper right. He had a dark sunken depression above and between his eyes, but a broad grin that lit up his face.

‘I bet getting shirts to fit is lookadat hard.’

’S’alright really. Never had time for fashion anyway.’

‘He’s an editor,’ said Jam. ‘They don’t get out a lot.’

‘Is there anything to drink but water?’ said Dielle.

‘Well,’ said Ed, ‘funny you should ask, but we were out foraging earlier and discovered a private wine cellar in a house on an upmarket form. Got a corkscrew and some glasses too.’

‘Wine for breakfast,’ said Dielle. ‘The First! Not recording this Kiki?’

‘Nope,’ she said, ‘can’t use anything with these two in shot. They’re crew. Let’s have a break. We could use a bit of light relief.’

Ed poured them all large glasses of a respectable Shiraz from a Mitchell vineyard and they sat and sipped and munched nutricake.

‘Don’t suppose you found anything else to eat other than this stuff,’ said Dielle. ‘I can’t even say I don’t like the taste—it doesn’t have one.’

‘Nobody stores food,’ said Kiki. ‘You just emti it on demand from hydro. We didn’t see so much as a bowl of fruit, but even if there is any out there, it’ll be inedible very soon.’

‘Can we get to hydro then?’ said Dielle. ‘There must be a load of food just going stale waiting on shelves or something.’

‘Waste of time and effort,’ said Jam. ‘It would take us days to get there and Sis would have moved everything viable to The Valley before she shut down.’

Dielle studied his nutricake with its texture like compacted dust, and remembered the farms that surrounded Up Haven. ‘I know where we might get some real food,’ he said.

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