Chaos Cipher (14 page)

‘
An
hour.’

Serat drifted
off.

His eyes were
open but he was suddenly gone.

‘
An hour!’
Yerma repeated.

Serat licked
his lips, eyes returning from whatever void the word had prompted
him to venture.

‘…
time
…’ he managed.

‘
An
hour?’

‘
A unit of
time.’

‘
Very
good.’

‘…
appraisal.’
Serat said dryly.

Yerma Holts
made the window transparent and Serat could finally see into the
other side. She was shorter than he was expecting, slim and he
wondered about the strange tattoo markings on the nape of her neck
and her temples. She smiled genuinely at Serat and crossed her
arms.

‘
We’ll have
you out of these soon, I promise.’

Serat began
to cough. He had made an attempt to speak but his lungs denied
him.

‘
Would you
like a glass of water?’

‘
A marker,’
he said, looking up at the window. ‘I’d like a pen. A marker of
some kind.’

‘
Is there
something you need to do?’

‘
Please…I’d
like a pen…it helps me to think.’

There was a
long pause while Yerma fetched a pen. Then a green light activated
by the door and the collection point rattled as the pen dropped
into the room. Malik got up slowly and staggered to the collection
box by the door. He put his jittering fingers into the post-flap
and retrieved the pen. It was a fat black marker. He popped the lid
to reveal the felt tip. Yerma watched as he ditheringly lowered to
his knee, raspy breaths made audible from his nostrils. The pen
squeaked as he lined an X onto the floor and Malik watched it
intensely.

‘
Doctor
Serat?’ Yerma called. ‘Doctor, please return to the testing
area.’

He
scrutinised the black X like it would do something, like it was
about to come to life and swallow him whole. His breathing grew
louder, more fearful. Malik Serat was growing dizzy.

‘
Malik!’ She
shouted.

‘
Where am I?’
he grunted.

‘
You’re in
the testing area…’

‘
I know that
much,’ he said angrily. ‘Where is this place? Where am I? This is
not the Erebus.’

‘
You’re
on
Orandoré
station orbiting Earth.’

Malik Serat
glared at his hands to see if he was dreaming or not. He wasn’t
sure ultimately. But he would conclude he was not at this point. He
popped the lid back on the pen and returned awkwardly to his
seat.

‘
We need to
run a few more tests,’ Yerma started. ‘I need you to concentrate
please.’

‘
May I keep
the pen?’

‘
Yes of
course you may,’ she said softly. ‘Now please, Doctor Malik. I want
you to full health before we continue.’

Ahead of him
a small white basin lifted out of the floor and came to shoulder
level. He saw an arrangement of amplifiers set out on its
surface.

‘
This is a
sensory test,’ she explained. ‘Ultra-haptics will render a
geometric shape on the device. You won’t be able to see it, but you
will be able to feel the sensory hologram. Try and tell me what
shape is in the ultra-haptic field.’

Reluctantly
he reached out his hand and was surprised to feel a physical
boundary in the invisible space. He used both hands now, eyes
gazing ahead as he concentrated on the shapes.

‘
It’s a
pyramid,’ he said, becoming more precise. ‘Tetragonal.’

Yerma pouted
her lip and nodded to show him she was impressed.

‘
They said
geometry was your speciality.’

‘
I studied
non-linear science,’ Malik Serat declared, sitting back wearily.
‘Geometry is advantageous for metaphysical exercises and for
imagining higher dimensions of space.’

‘
Next
analogue, please,’ Yerma ordered.

Serat sat
forth again, reaching his right hand over the amplifiers to feel
the shape. He kept his hand still, confused by the
sensations.

‘
It’s
moving.’ He said.

‘
Yes,’ she
smiled. ‘I figured it would be too easy for you
otherwise.’

Malik Serat
shut his eyes. The whole cloud of reality peeled away from his
consciousness. He was falling. The hull of the Erebus was cracking
all around him, heating up exponentially. He tumbled in his heavy
suit, gasping into the thick helmet, the fisheye lens dome cracking
in the extreme blasts of radiation.

‘
It’s not a
three dimensional shape,’ he decided, sitting back.

Yerma’s smile
was giving the game away, she mirrored the window.

‘
You’re
passing a four dimensional shape through a three dimensional field.
It’s moving vertically.’

Malik stared
at his gaunt reflection a little longer as his mind rendered the
geometric analogue.

‘
It’s a
simplex,’ said Serat. ‘Ninety six edges, twenty four vertices. It’s
a twenty four cell.’ And without being prompted he added. ‘A
beautiful example of chaos forming order - like a four dimensional
snow flake.’

‘
Sounds like
you admire this one,’ said Yerma, turning the glass once more
transparent. She allowed the lighting contrast to rise and he could
see she was wearing a dark uniform with a green insignia and
electronic nodes on the tight fitted jumpsuit, and a white jacket
over her shoulder that was long and draping.

‘
I admire
purity,’ he admitted. ‘There’s nothing pure about the twenty four
cell. It’s nice and neat. If you want real chaos…you’d have to
imagine the dimensional reach of a three hundred and eighty six
cell in five dimensions. Now we’re talking
chaos
. That is pure.’

‘
Is this what
you believe?’

‘
Yes, I
believe in purity,’ said Malik Serat, ‘and chaos is pure, like the
chaos in the heart of a black hole is absolutely pure and so
elegantly simple at the same time. I’ve lived it, trust me. Pure
chaos. Yet, there is logic to it. The sands find the bottom of the
sea; the air finds its place between earth and the cosmos. Shadow
finds its hiding place behind objects and light brings into
existence almost everything. Everything distils. Entropy disperses
energy to seek equilibrium. We humans build to destroy and rebuild
for destruction’s calling. This is the very chemistry of life. We
fight it, falling to pieces…shattering like glass ready to be
rebuilt. Oh - how we fight it.’

‘
Purity is an
ambiguous thing to believe in, wouldn’t you agree?’ she asked,
folding her arms.

‘
Credo ut
intelligam.’ Malik Serat crowed. ‘To believe so to understand. But
to destroy, so as to
know
. What is it that you
believe?’

Yerma chose
not to respond; rather she remained occupationally stilted and
hoped for Malik Serat to field his own question.

‘
I think you
believe in something Miss Holts. Do you believe in God?’ he asked
with an awry smirk, still shaking, but coming to life with his own
thoughts.

‘
I
believe...’ Yerma said with careful deliberation, ‘in some higher
power above me, yes. I am a Titan of the Atominii. It’s my right
and freedom to believe there is something more to this and more
than myself.’

‘
And so then,
you must believe in good and evil?’

‘
Yes,’ she
said.

‘
Why?’ Serat
scowled suddenly, pulling himself away from the haptic hologram to
analyse her. ‘I mean, all I see is people. People, people, people,
people, people. Weak and feeble, overestimated. Over bred. Over
fed. Over stimulated, over worked, and over fought, over and over
and over. Fucking people! It’s just us and our beliefs. It has been
the condition of man to ignore truth and accept absurdity for far
too long now. Credo quia absurdum est, Doctor Yerma. I assume you
know Latin?’

Yerma nodded
her head, smiling, waiting to be indulged.

‘
It means I
believe it because it’s absurd. And as the French philosopher
Voltaire once said, those who can make you believe in absurdity can
make you commit atrocity. Belief is a mysterious thing indeed…don’t
you think?’

Malik sat
back, lifted his nose confidently as though he might get a scent of
what perfume Yerma was wearing but he did not.

‘
There are
those who called me aloof.’ Malik Serat was smiling at this.
‘Uncouth even.’ He added and there was no mistaking his pride. ‘One
of the Erebus crew members Dale Hister, once told me religion is an
ideology enforced through indoctrination. Spirituality, he said, is
yours. It’s your experience, your life, your essence, your thought.
Hister was the Erebus spiritual guidance officer, an early
pneumatan. That was his belief.’

‘
That’s an
interesting perspective,’ Yerma said, leaning on one of the
consoles as she spoke with Malik through the window.

‘
Do you want
to know what I told him?’

‘
Of course,’
she smiled.

‘
That I
believe in chaos.’ He said. ‘I understand it deeply. Chaos is my
nature, my spirituality, my intuition and it is guided by
experience. I have studied the consequences of it as well as
natures of it. I know truly it exists. It is not an absurdity, it
is neither good nor evil, but a pure truth that inspires in us our
need to assemble and order. Things breaking into disorder and then
restructuring, always fighting the great disembark, death seeding
life finding death cyclically. Breaking apart, restructuring all
evolutionary trial and error.

‘
How can you
believe your spirituality is anything without the forces of chaos
and entropy? Chaos is the absolute dimension, not time. The idea of
time will die. Chaos is imminent and the direction of matter is the
vector that creates time, not the other way around.’ Malik simpered
eerily, ‘time and matter. Matter and time...’ and he leaned forth,
returning his hand to the haptic field to sense the hypercube
unfolding into three dimensional space, like a crucifix built of
cubes. ‘It’s all just a matter of time.’

-8-

T
he sun was high on the hills of the
Novus, the outskirt boarders of Cerise Timbers. For a hundred miles
in every direction scouts like Jasper and his team patrolled the
lands, hunting down drones and keeping an eye on enemy activity. To
the South, they had alliances with the Kazakhstan Confederalism.
But there were also many dangers coming from the Cyber-Caliphates
beyond, where many anarchist allies were fighting a fierce war
against a spreading rogue-Atominii. To the North lay the threat of
Moscowai’s Atominii, and the recent activities in his area brought
about whispers that made Jasper nervous, rumours about the
reappearance of Blue Lycans.

Fimble was
rattling on the dashboard of the ranger jeep while Jasper stood
over the wheel, binoculars up to his eyes. Somewhere in the back he
was aware of Lexy positioned beneath a Mag-Spear Megawatt Gauss
weapon, a specialised makeshift velociter. Like an oversized
shotgun it pointed restively to the sky, hinged to a high framed
fulcrum above the rear seat on which it pivoted. Fimble’s fingers
drummed away, percussively tapping out a beat as he masticated on
some sugar gum and stared pensively from behind his
sunshades.

‘
Got it,’ he
muttered. ‘Hmm…yeah…got it.’

Jasper turned
his head, his attention to the Novus broken. He piqued slightly
with a scowl and returned his gaze on the vast hot and dry tundra,
trying not to listen to Fimble’s mumbles and humming. His
Eagle-Clan tattoo twitched over his forearm as he drummed at the
dashboard.

Lexy lay
back, her hands behind her large helmet, her foot rocking to the
rhythm of Fimble’s beat.

‘
Hmm…yeah…okay, Jasper, listen up I got one.’

Fimble sat
forward and back hand swiped Jasper’s shoulder to get his
attention.

‘
What, what?’
he hissed angrily.

‘
I got one,
listen up man.’

‘
I’m
listening man, Jesus!’

‘
Okay.
Alright. Yo. Yo.
Listen.’

Fimble
cleared his throat and puckered his lips, taking two or three deep
breaths through his nose. He made a big show of preparing himself,
something intense was about to follow, something real. Fimble
started tapping, beating his fingers, timing himself in.

‘
Magazines
like lead bricks set aside by the gearstick

Another day
out in the Novus, in the rangers, hills roll past

Kick-back,
we’re the scouters, setting right any doubters

Sitting tight
here on the outer fringes of a new world order

They play the
game with drones