SLIDERCON

Continued from: 'Frisco Babylon'

an outline for an unfinished 'SLIDERS' fanfic premise challenge that you can help brainstorm, revise and develop on the forum.

Tumbling within the wormhole, the SLIDERS behold in astonishment as Collin, who had burst on stage at the last possible second at ^Worldstock:, and now turned ghostly and transparent, reaches out to brush finger tips with Mallory. And, in a flash, Collin is solid once again, while Mallory has fissioned back into Mallory and QUINN!

Deposited from the vortex, Remmy, Dianna, Maggie, Mallory, Quinn and Collin find themselves amid the throngs of a crowded Dominion Hotel lobby, where Remmy, Quinn and Maggie catch site of ARTURO and WADE!

But amid the surging crowds, they all become separated once again. Only to come upon multiple doubles of everyone! For, this is SLIDERCON, the Interdimensional Sliders Convention! And who's got the timer??!
 

Yes, our heroes have landed in the midst of an Interdimensional Sliders convention! And since the Chandler isn't big enough, even with overflow to the Motel-12, the Chandler's capacity has been expanded by  using several alternate Chandler hotels.

For, on each world where the Dominion Hotel is hosting SLIDERCON, there is in operation a special hypersonic/subsonic tone oscillator uniquely effecting the inner ear, allowing attendees, with a little practice, to orient themselves just askew of whichever three dimensional plane they occupy, in order to find their way through the hotel corridors to adjacent planes, facets of the Dominion Hotel, so long as the tone generator is also in operation there as well.

And when our heroes find themselves separated, lost to one another amid the burgeoning crowds, the fall back plan, as always, is to rendez vous in their hotel room. But the only rooms available are the cheep ones left over in a run down alternate Chandler in a neighborhood gone seedy.

And, of course, that will spell trouble!

Bibliography:

Hyperspatial Geometry as in Robert Heinlien's enduring classic "...And He Built a Crooked House--". Or as freely retold by Bob Seitz. Also reference the Mathematical Fiction listing and be sure to experience the Stereoscopic Animated Hypercube.

 

Cube 2: Hypercube on the Sci-Fi Channel is set inside a deadly boobytrapped tesseractal structure not only violating conventionally experienced geometry, but manifesting time dilation and alternate reality.

The Dominion Hotel as it exists on so many different planes, can be viewed as roughly tesseractal. But with even more dimensions, exponentially increasing the number of facets.
 

The result is to effectively render the Dominion Hotel bigger on the inside than the outside, indeed, not unlike the TARDIS.

The interdimensional conduit for the unwary provided by the Dominion Hotel during SLIDERCON, makes a handy plot device for 'SLIDERS: CASCADE', an anthology concept (of which 'Frisco Babylon' also serves as a pilot) providing fresh new fish out of water for each story. Indeed, as it turns out, even after SLIDERCON is over, the deactivated hypersonic/subsonic tone oscillators, simply left in place pending the next SLIDERCON, can still be utilized by exploiting  the sympathetic resonance from a special tuning fork. 

At SLIDERCON Wade discovers an Advanced Automate Link Working Network Sociometry terminal which connects her to Diana who is at that moment Online via the wireless modem of her Personal Digital Assistant (the palm top she caries) being matched with exactly the best and most compatible scientific minds who can help them find their way past the Slide Cage and reunite with Quinn and Collin's parents.

Remmy even participates in AAdvanced Automate Link Working Network Sociometry in order to get fixed up on a hot date at the hotel dance club.

But, as Arturo hurries to book the last cheap room, so that everyone will be able to regroup according to the standard fall back plan, instead they all run afoul of a series of sly obnoxious diversionary pranks and unending malicious gossip! Even Remmy's hot dance club date is similarly ruined. Indeed, Arturo, blustering and outraged, finding his convention name tag stolen from off his jacket lapel, nearly gets hustled out of the hotel onto the streets of Babylonian America! It is this which affords ZHONA the diversion by which she gains entry to the Dominion Hotel, one step ahead of her violent John. Hotel security then let's loose of Arturo to pursue Zhona, instead, but she disappears into the throngs of convention goers.

Meanwhile, Collin, overhearing the malicious gossip, and ferreting out the conspiratorial abuse, seeks out the assistance of a group calling themselves the CliqueBusters TM, who offer to help orchestrate the embarrassing exposure of the obnoxious bullies known as the Nouveau-Whipped, so that the Sliders can get about their business unobstructed. And just in time, because that's just when Maggie and Mallory finally turn up, ready to kick ass! But Wade calms her down. Indeed, Maggie is overwhelmed to see Wade again. -Not to mention Arturo!

"Rickman killed you!" blurts out Remmy, arriving on the scene. "Rickman, whoever that is, killed my scheming double who was already terminal from cancer." retorts the Professor. "You left the real me behind!" "At the Assure gate! I always wondered! But Wade. The Chromaggs..." "It wasn't me, Remmy. I was lucky and escaped. They've been cannibalizing my doubles in some gruesome ESP experiment." "We blew up those inhuman Maggs real good." Remmy assures her. "The Maggs and the poor souls who's brains they mutilated."

Later, all crowded into the hotel room, just as Qinn and Mallory turn up, the CliqueBusters TM explain that the Sliders are targets of bullying because Sliding has isolated them. And the Relational Bullies, obnoxious cliquish Sadomasochist Dilettantes known as the Nouveau-Whipped, resentful of competition and already slipping in control and influence thanks to the egalitarian interactivity of Advanced Automate Link Working Network Sociometryr, are desperate to keep our heroes as socially isolated as possible in order to prevent their presence from exciting any further serious interest in the teachings of Slidology already reaching SLIDERCON from the world of the Seer where the Sliders had found themselves celebrities of a new religion founded by a blind psychic visionary dedicated to global redemption via the promotion of all the positive values exemplified by our heroes in their adventures.

Remmy is grateful to Collin and the CliqueBusters TM for saving his hot Dominion Hotel Dance Club date from disaster. And Quinn wishes they'd had a CliqueBusters TM chapter in his grade school. Quinn would never have been driven to such desperation as to go after his tormentors with a base ball bat, and that tragedy might have been averited.

Later, back out amid the convention throngs, JUDY TENUDA is cast as the CliqueBusters TM shill at SLIDERCON, who helps entrap and then publicly humiliate the self-serving "protective" Relational Bullies, the Nouveau-Whipped, typical self serving appointed chaperones and arbiters of feminine virtue, into her famous and blisteringly contemptuous "fragile flower" damsel in distress parody, at their expense.

(HEY, it could HAH-ppen!)

But New Age Wade disapproves of CliqueBusters TM, on the grounds that Advanced Automate Link Working Network Sociometry promises to help lonely and miserable bullies too, non-confrontationally and without shaming them, by matching them to better influences, so that they will become happy and productive, and loose interest in abusive behavior. Indeed, even one of the CliqueBusters TM himself is just such a reformed maladaptive.

In response, Collin argues that the CliqueBusters TM have, after all, have come together via Advanced Automate Link Working Network Sociometry. -And why, if not to do exactly as they are?

But, surprisingly, Arturo finds himself in agreement with Wade.  Sociometricly intermediated interaction should not be anthropomorphized. Arturo rejects the notion that Advanced Automate Link Working Network Sociometry actually formulated a plan in creating the CliqueBusters TM. It's simply that compatible people when networked together will tend to act in concert towards common interests, for good or ill, social evolution then taking it's course.

While, on the other hand, anyone who is allowed to fall through the cracks in any kind of society may well come back to haunt them, in low or high places, birds of a dirty feather likewise flocking together, the abused becoming abusers, except, indeed, in some kind of Utopia.

Arturo then confides in the others his own experiences with Racists during the Civil Rights Struggle, and more particularly, how the police investigation seemed distinctly half-hearted following the Gaybashing of a close college of Arturo's, who actually happened to be straight, into permanent injury, simply because he'd been seen hugging Arturo goodbye in a restaurant where they had gone for dinner with friends. For such are the actions of marginal and disturbed personalities who otherwise won't come out of the woodwork, unless whatever it is that threatens them so, and sets them off, becomes more prevalent in society.

Case in point, Advanced Automate Link Working Network Sociometryintermediation at SLIDERCON resulted open expression and acceptance such that fill repressed people with jealous rage which they then do tend to act out in just such a destructive and juvenile manner as the SLIDERS have just endured, even if not as overtly violent as the tactics of Racists and Gaybashers, but, likewise, with impunity, just so long as the society and it's authorities still tend to look the other way or simply fail in formulation of any coherent response.

Remmy agrees that he certainly did sense something ugly. Maybe this won't be the end off it. Bigots of what ever stripe just don't quit that easily. And discretion may prove the better part of valor.

In summation, and characteristically, Arturo urges his fellow SLIDERS not to become involved.

Quinn, however, insists that they are already inextricably involved, because backing down to bullies is actually what spurs them on the more.

More over, Quinn has come to a realization that a contributing cause of his father Michael Mallory's death in a car accident on the way to work, when Quinn was eleven, was extreme stress because his father quite suddenly found himself being bullied out of his job by a manipulative sociopath at his work place, a rival for a job promotion! Indeed, Quinn's father. normally a very meticulous individual, was actually obstructed and delayed from routine maintenance on his car by evil gossip and peer pressure, such that he felt uneasy and inhibited from making personal calls from work, even to the auto garage. Otherwise, the steering and breaks which where due for a regular tune up, would have been maintained in tip top peak condition, as was Michael Mallory's customary routine, indeed, which had made the crucial of survival difference on other Earths where he was not bullied and therefore took greater care.

Not surprisingly, the CliqueBusters TM are in full agreement, no less adamant that bullying is, among so many other evils, reckless endangerment within society.

And so, Quinn and Mallory resolve to follow wily Collin's lead, and stage a quarrel, so that Mallory can pretend to yield to peer pressure, into the orbit of the obnoxious clique, and work with the CliqueBusters TM to turn the tables on them.

Under the guidance of the CliqueBusters TM, Mallory then makes introductions for Diana the chronic relationship victim, who will be irresistible to the self-enamored Nouveau-Whipped. Together with Maggie, also Wade -misgivings and all, Diana pretends to fall under the sway of the Relational Bullies in order to infiltrate their clique and pump the self-absorbed braggarts for information by feigning Sadistic approval for their petty intrigues! Because, as we all know, Relational Bullies cannot resist validation by approval seeking enablers. Especially cute ones leggy ones with cleavage! But hot tempered Maggie's beguiling smile finally breaks, incensed with righteous indignation. At which point Wade also waffles into an appeal to universal love and sweet reason.

Too late do the Nouveau-Whipped realize that something is amiss, and discover that Diana's PID is broadcasting their self incrimination over the Dominion Hotel Public Address system! But they vow revenge for the humiliating exposure!

The premise:

According to the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, not only the future, but also even the past, is probabilistic. In other words, better supported explanations affirming the observable consequent are not so much plainly true as simply by far more likely, and hypothetical events that would conflict thereto are not so much refuted as highly unlikely.

 

Hence, the range of however allowably possible and probable past scenarios may even correspond with 'Rashuman'-style conflicting memories of different people as manifestation of relative divergent private reality. -The reconstructive nature of memory being, indeed, an evolutionary adaptation to function in a universe governed by the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

 

Because somehow seemingly on the world of Quantum Justice, the decoherence of Quantum Darwinism is weaker and the more stable pointer states of "objective reality" are less robust.

And so it comes to pass that the SLIDERS find themselves on a world where such is actually the basis of a legal system, the motivated goal put forth being to persuade the defendants to acquit themselves. Thus, the Prosecutor may become the confessor and only hope for the accused, while the defense attorney is a devilish seductive deceiver and a threat to the defendant.

Because, if the defendant's rationalization will be in any way too far fetched and improbably contrived, they vanish from shared reality into the isolation of a world all their own! But does Quantum Justice rid the world only of delusional Sociopathic depraved indifference, or also of visionaries and dissidents? For the abandonment of reason in the name of inclusion actually tends, instead, to intrusion and intolerance.

Note: As this is Polynesian America, some part the Civil Code may be derived and updated from Potlatch, a Polynesian ceremony in which accounts are kept up to date, and barter debts squared off.

On the docket:

The Nouveau-Whipped are out for revenge, via instigation and trumped up charges. For, as Donner suggested in 8.7.99 11 (SIY), hot tempered Maggie is arrested for "tactile rape" for so much as touching another person!

Yes, it seems that our Maggie has gotten into a shoving match with Zhona. Or in an expression of pique, touched her at all, somehow condescendingly...  Tempers where heated, and the story improves with every telling, so no one knows exactly for sure. Nor, apparently, is there consensus as to what degree actually constitutes transgression to begin with.

 

Indeed, as Donner suggested initially, is any kind of bodily contact, what so ever (or for that matter, even eye contact or the wrong "vibe!") taboo in this culture (or subculture)? It all hardly even seems consistent, much less proportional and sensible. 

In the end, however, judgment is passed and sentence is carried out:

Maggie gets, quite literally, a slap on the wrist! A punishment to fit the crime, much to the fury of the Nouveau-Whipped. And it dawns upon our heroes that, as might be expected here on Freud World, the entire "trial" has really served, instead of the kangaroo court schemed for by the Nouveau-Whipped, actually the Psychotherapeutic purpose of an Encounter Group!

But Zhona, unsuspecting, has only placed herself in jeopardy, remaining fool enough and full enough of herself to actually believe in her own petty grievance, will slide back into the gutter from whence she came, like unto the shade of Eurydice slipping away down to Hades!

The obligatory crossover:

As fate (and somewhat blatant foreshadowing cameos) would have it, Maggie's defense attorney, seeking a conviction on Maggie Becket's counter claim in order to save Zhona, is in actuality, Maggie's uncle, one Samuel Becket, while the opposing counsel is the Evil Leaper! 

The dénouement:
Making their weary way back to the Domion Hotel, our heroes finally have time to articulate nagging and surprising questions about SLIDERCON itself, to whit, how many sliding civilization are there throughout space-time, and just how is SLIDERCON promoted? Or is SLIDERCON just somehow just attractive to wormholes, situated on some manner of interdimensional nexus? And if that be the case, how is SLIDERCON protected or concealed from the the murderous Kromaggs? And, so musing and wondering, our heroes enter the hotel lobby, only to discover, much to their chagrin, Logan St. Claire and Kolitar billed as the key note speakers at SLIDERCON! -and run  screaming from the hotel back out onto the streets of yet another alternate world!

In their mad dash, they fail to notice the scene of a hapless pimp bereted by his ho's shrill and overbearing union shop steward. The pimp is a double of Quinn, one of the Nouveau-Whipped, and the union rep is none other than Zhona*...

In their panicked haste, the SLIDERS also fail to notice Mary watching. Nor is the altercation lost on Mary, but Kolitar shoots her a dirty look as if to say not to get any ideas. In conversation with Kolitar, the Kromaggs' involvement and motivation in reuniting the Sliders all along, to then track them on their quest to reunite with Quinn and Colin's real parents, is exposited.

 

FADE OUT

 

 

 

 

Copyright Aaron Agassi 2006 - 2029, compiled largely from material copyrighted 2002 - 2005

Help brainstorm, revise and develop from this outline for an unfinished 'SLIDERS' fanfic premise on the