Chaos Cipher (43 page)

‘
Why would
violence be a necessary human desire?’ Malik questioned, smiling
playfully.

‘
Many people
do it,’ said Vance without irony. ‘It’s a common characteristic in
mankind. It is human nature to be violent.’

‘
This
world...’ Malik said thoughtfully, ‘this world is Pandora’s box.
Everything has consequence. Whatever exists in the hardlands, the
laws, the authority of a secret government, it all bleeds into the
quasiland. Violent structures breed violent people. One can make a
strong case to say that mankind is equally cooperative as it is
violent. When you create a being in the digital world you are
exercising a part of this AI protocol and the AI is learning
something about your nature reciprocally. When you kill that
personality, what do you suppose the AI learned from it? Was that
ever considered? Pardon me, Vance, but I don’t believe by denying
the facts you are being very smart in your domination,
brother.’

‘
Funny you
should say about violence bleeding into the Nexus. There is an
affliction here,’ said Filipe additionally, ‘which your brother
doesn’t wish to talk about. It is the disorder classified to a
reclusive social group of people on the Nexus referred to as
Wire-heads.’

‘
Is that so?’
Malik crowed, ‘do tell.’

‘
Well,’
Filipe started, ‘Wire-heads refers to a condition called Nexus
Source Amnesia. They are obsessed with their virtual lives. It is,
of course, when a person is lost within the varying artificial
realities. If you think about it, you can see that humans naturally
adapt to environments, they construct our memory, our experiences
with reality are necessary to develop our psyche. In this universe,
things are changing always, things are not constant, so one loses a
sense of what reality is and a sense of perspective, there’s no
reference in the Nexus, no consistency, no laws of nature. It is no
different for Titans, we’re evolved from humanity. If you cannot
feel the plants, taste the food as reality informs us, then when we
experience these artifices we lose our earthly connection, the
simulation is not quite the same as the real thing. And of course
our connection with each other is also very important
but...’

‘
Nonsense,’
said Vance obstinately, ‘stop vacillating between morality and
reality Filipe. Per angusta ad augusta, Filipe. This is our present
life, a Dionysian world within an Apollonian state. This is a free
world where we are free to make it as we will and make it our
own...’

‘
What are
they like these...Wire-heads?’ asked Malik. ‘I want to know more
about them; you said they have Nexus Source Amnesia?’

‘
As I said,’
Filipe resumed, ‘they’ve lost the ability to recognise the hardland
real world. To them reality seems tiresome, drab and dull. This is
why Titans are by the limitation law encouraged to walk around the
city, disconnect now and then from the Nexus for what we call
sentience exercising. Otherwise, you can get lost...like the
Wire-heads. They do not care about permadeath, all it means is
they’re thrown into another experience. Death for them is not just
a myth, it is almost a fantasy as well. This is why we say they are
a little lost.’

‘
I wish you’d
get lost,’ Vance maliciously spited. ‘This is a rare disease you
are talking about.’

As they
passed into a new part of the city, they ambled onto a platform
that seemed to hover away from a solid part of the ground and carry
them across the air as a boat gracing still waters, and in the
Nexus, they had stepped onto a large wooden junk that hung on sail
lines from a hot air pillow, and up in the wheelhouse, an android
steered them through the clouds.

The Nexus
created for Malik grand antebellum schemes, motifs of gilded
baroque houses, the large pillars holding up Borromini curved walls
sheltering the nameless, stucco effigies of human memory in their
coves, symbolic and lost. Slanted mansard roofs and Baldachin
steeples, where suspended giant, bronze bells swung and chimed
their droning peals. Fragmentary castellations left to hang and jut
into the sky, teetered over a waterless river of air, a gravity
lake of skinless invisible vibrations providing buoyancy for their
journey.

‘
In this
place anybody can get lost,’ said Filipe, staring in astonishment
at the faux impressions of buildings and pseudo-keels. And they
hovered under a large arching bridge that founded the substructure
for more houses and windows. Yet, when Malik dropped out of the
Nexus interface, the viscera returned to its pallid uniformity, of
basic shapes, a machine house of plain geometrical constructs
shifting to build walkways beneath people’s feet, or to uphold the
walls and ceilings, where needed. The clockwork technology was the
skeleton of humanity’s dreamscapes, technology instrumental to
their fantasies, the thing that moved hidden beneath it all, yet
never changed. And though the bridge was real, there was nothing
upon it but air, and under their feet now ran several tracks to
support the platform upon which they stood, that in the Nexus
appeared as a junk suspended from a helium balloon.

‘
Who would
deny one’s right to get lost in their dreams and fantasies?’ Vance
pondered aloud. ‘Is it not right for man to realise his deepest
desires?’ and he looked to Malik in preparation to hear his rebuke.
‘Or are you still with Heraclitus on this one?’ he asked. ‘Would it
not be better for mankind to be given their desires?’

Malik held
his hands behind his back and shrugged. ‘If anything, I’ve been
sated many desires since my arrival home.’ He commented. ‘I don’t
believe it has informed anything but my acceptance and a notable
spark in my ego.’

‘
Good,’ Vance
said. ‘A true Serat is nothing without his ego.’

Several times
the Nexus servers pestered Malik to connect to the interface, but
he preferred to see the real mechanics of their illusion. It was
the intrinsic mechanisms that fascinated him the most, not the
superfluous, but the things that ran beneath the skin of the Nexus
artifice. He understood the purpose of the fantasy, understood well
that he was missing aspects of the ideology that would be very
telling of their culture, but there was something about the way
these physical boundaries moved beneath the façade that reminded
him of his sub-dimensional theories. Though one seemed fruitless
without the other, the logic of its premise was real, it was for
him, a city that was detailed and patterned as one big puzzle. But
it’s within substructure which lay the true limits of the Nexus,
here he saw the raw kernel of its real identity, uniform and simple
and elegant, yet formulating a great complexity, holding its
citizens within unseen boundaries, serving them while
contemporaneously making them build. Much it was the way with
people. Malik began to contemplate that perhaps one of the reasons
why he did not get on well with people was because he was too busy
exploring their mechanisms, their greedy desires, their compulsions
and shallow hedonisms and so many predictable similarities, all the
while missing their masks, their personalities.

Atominus
Phalange was nothing more than an enlarged version of Yerma’s
cognitive tests back on
Orandoré
. He would not be part of
the fantastic construction, hoping he’d sense only the surface
suggestions, but Malik couldn’t help but see deeper. He would look
for another pattern, another use for this wondrous potential. He
was thinking about structure.

They moved
finally into a large room void of almost everything save an
enormous window where daylight slanted in from above and cast a
white quadrilateral crop of light across its palladium tiles and a
very wide stairway, and Vance stepped up to the edge and stared out
at the endless foam of the stirring cyclone below.

‘
Behold the
beautiful nimbolantis.’ He introduced. ‘This storm has been turning
for the last thirty years. Incredible, don’t you think? They come
and go every now and then. We haven’t burned a barrel of oil in
centuries and yet today...we still see the shadow of yesterday.
Small things...big consequences as you’d say.’

‘
That is
truly the mark of chaos,’ said Malik. ‘But global climate change
was no small thing.’

‘
Ah,’ Vance
harked with a slanted smile, ‘non-linear physics, is your
speciality. You are the chaotician of the Erebus, Doctor Malik
Serat. And speaking of chaos,’ Vance jovially adduced, ‘let me get
you accustomed with some more entertaining features of the Nexus. I
think a little warm up should suffice before we start some…’ and
Vance smiled at his brother, ‘memory hacking.’

-30-

D
ak and Sonja both led the way
through the sky port’s atrium towards their assigned gate and Kyo
followed, shouldering a few essential items they’d picked up
earlier from home. Amongst which he’d grabbed a thermal jacket,
well-padded and black, well insulated with a thick collar. He
didn’t like the way Dak was behaving lately and felt that maybe he
was disgruntled at him for something. Then Sonja turned to face her
son and smiled evenly with some reassurances, as if sensing his
anxieties.

‘
You okay?’
she asked.

Kyo nodded,
eyes shifting to the air zone where he saw distantly the
Perigrussia Skybus basking in the sunlight. They walked through the
long empty lanes, passing several unused gates with empty take-off
and landing pedestals for the SkyLarks. At the far end they saw the
usual sky gliders, testing their fan powered boogies and curving
into the low altitudes. The air zone strips had otherwise been
cleared for a clean-down, and only the Perigrussia now stood upon
its runways where the various robots and volunteers swept and
worked. The Perigrussia Skybus belly was open, a cargo elevator
with various boxes and containers waiting below to be lifted into
the artichoke viscera of the cargo’s cabin.

Krupin’s
security staff stood attentively at the ship’s ascending stairway,
their muscles engineered, visibly displayed on their one suits,
which delineated information such as recent nutritional intakes and
strength capacity and potential, a superfluous intimidation
tactics, which were usually insincere, but many would never dare
put such people to the test. The bodyguards were tall and
unflinching, almost identical in stature and feature, like two
carvings clad in military smart-fabrics.

‘
Is that
him?’ asked Dak glaring angrily out of the lane’s window panels
running the length of the long hall.

‘
Yes,’ said
Sonja. ‘That’s him.’

‘
Alright,
let’s do this quickly.’ Dak said, ‘Kyo, hide yourself between
us.’

Kyo didn’t
question, he did as he was told.

Out on the
runway, a SkyLark sat on its cupped pedestal, a pilot already
checking the engines and making sure the power cells were
operational and the navigation computer was accessible. Dak
unfastened his backpack and ensured he had the navigation
codes.

‘
All set,’ he
said checking the nano-tronic graphene sheet as various navigation
digitals swirled around before him.

‘
Dak,’ said
Sonja, scaling the side of the machine ‘don’t forget. We’re issued
with a special code for returning to the dome.’

‘
I’ve got the
codes saved on Quantic-W.’ He said offhandedly as he analysed the
readouts before him.

‘
Good,’ said
Sonja, loading bags into the back with Kyo, ‘Enaya said she’ll keep
us informed about what’s happening.’

Kyo checked
his Quantic-W and accessed the caller menus and looked up
Pania.

‘
Hey,’ she
said, her face appearing on the screen. ‘You in the air
yet?’

‘
Not yet,’ he
answered solemnly, ‘just setting off now, thought I’d test my
caller line.’

‘
Good,’ she
sighed, ‘I’m going to let you in on what’s happening here. Looks
like we’re gonna come down heavy on Lewis for the fire. He won’t be
expecting this kind of action, I think. But I’m going to have to
come clean about my vandalism stunt which could probably hurt my
own reputation but…at least I got one.’

‘
Well,’ Kyo
said thoughtfully. ‘I thought you were justified. He is a
fascist.’

And she
laughed. ‘Suppose you’re right.’

‘
Everyone
knows it,’ Kyo smiled. ‘Also, it was a great job. You should make a
satirical Hitler version of me some day.’

‘
No,’ Pania
sniggered, ‘you’d be more like…I dunno…something that eats
pencils.’

Kyo smiled
and promised. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

‘
Don’t forget
your pencils.’

Kyo pulled a
chewed pencil from his coat and jammed it between his teeth, his
eyes carrying a joyous smile. Pania winked and blew him a kiss,
then disconnected the call.

After test
running the engines, the pilot stepped down from the launch
pedestal and Dak punched in the engine codes. Sonja settled in as
the cabin slid over their heads and sealed them in and the launch
pedestal rose into the air like a large crane. A downward thrust
balanced the vessel and the launch-codes decoupled them and in a
moment the SkyLark was away and hovering up above the large city
dome.