Chaos Cipher (61 page)

‘
Look at me
you shit! Look at me…yeah you remember, don’t ya?’

Kyo frowned,
confused with fear and anger, his hands already raised
defensively.

‘
Hey!’ Krupin
shouted, pulling Hattle away. ‘Leave it alone! The gene-freak stays
very still and alone, got it?’

Hattle
stepped back and cleared his nasal over Kyo before walking past
Vadim.

‘
You are very
strong,’ said Vadim sardonically, arms still folded over his
weapon.

‘
Cheers
fella,’ said Hattle, patting his shoulder and then shouting into
the other room: ‘it’s definitely him.’

Pierce Lewis
entered the cargo area where the swinging chains chimed above from
the motion of the cadonavis. There was a long and awkward silence
as Pierce thought what to say to him, the dull toll of the cargo
bay’s loading crane knocking against the hull, timing out the
seconds. His face softened as he looked at the boy, whimpering in a
ball. Pierce strolled leisurely over to Kyo and knelt beside him
and took a deep breath, deciding on a more sympathetic approach
than the others. After all, he was a reasonable man, it’s just the
anarchists didn’t know it. They missed out on a merciful leader
with him, a great man who had much to offer their world, order,
safety, fools wanted none of it.

‘
It’s nothing
personal, son,’ he said. ‘Your kind just are not supposed to exist.
You’re not supposed to be even on this planet. I’d blame your
parents but we don’t even know who they really are.’

‘
You took me
away from them,’ Kyo mumbled.

‘
Your real
parents abandoned you. Nobody wants you, y’know? Just left you by a
lake somewhere, regrettably. As for the anarchists…they’ll take
anyone in…anyone to fill the emptiness of their existence. Sad
really. But this man, Krupin. Well...he’s got an eye for talent. He
sees something in you. Something really special and wonderful and
he’s going to make use of that gift. He’ll treat you like a son,
make you tough and strong. He’s your family now. So you better
start getting to know these chaps, alright?’

‘
I’m Vadim,’
Raw-Dog the fighter stated with a cruel smirk, ‘I guess now I’m
you’re big brother.’

‘
There, you
see?’ said Pierce. ‘And you’ve sisters as well. Many beautiful
tight arse young ladies waiting on you hand and foot. Why wouldn’t
you want to be here? Hell of a family.’

Pierce
reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and retrieved a flask.
He turned the cap and held it out to Kyo, head still buried in his
knees to which he lifted on smelling the strong whiskey and
declined to drink. Pierce shrugged and took a big mouth full, and
patted Kyo hard on the back.

‘
There there,
little man,’ he said standing, ‘you’re going to have a lot of
adjusting to do, I think.’

-45-

M
alik opened his eyes slowly and saw
the darkness all around. The sensorium chamber’s flood lights shone
dimly from above, and the occasional drip of water tapped through
the silence, pip, blup, pob.

‘
Vance?’ he
tried tiredly, but his mind was effeted.

‘
Relax
Malik,’ his brother’s jovial tone came in. ‘I’m sedating you via
neuro-stimulation.’

‘
Is it over?’
he asked. ‘Have you seen enough?’

‘
Quite,’
Vance said.

‘
I want you
to let me out.’

‘
Who is
this…Penelope Hurt?’

‘
You have
everything you need!’ Malik insisted, tugging drearily against the
arm restraints. ‘Let me out…’

‘
Is
she…alive?’ he asked. ‘Is she still alive on the Erebus? Is she
trapped in those temporal dopplers she talks about? Is she in your
mind? Animate her for me Malik. Let me see her.’

‘
No…’ Malik
whispered.

But it was
too late. The neurophase sensed his synapses more acutely than he
could hide his thoughts, and Penelope was in the chamber. She
crouched down on the walkway above the waters, chalking a pattern
into the floor and whispering calculations to herself.

‘
Ahhh,’ he
heard Vance say, ‘there she is.’

‘
Vance!’
Malik urged. ‘Stop this!’

Penelope
turned her head and looked at Malik in the chair. She stood to her
full height, only a short young woman, her short hair flaying out
from the sides of her cap, her eyes like sable pits.

‘
We’re going
to make it,’ she promised.

Suddenly, the
turbulence was upon him again, the sickening pull of gravity
drawing him down. Malik cried out against it, his diaphragm
twitching for shallow breaths. And the chaos cipher’s numerous
shapes and codes appeared all around the chamber like lightning,
scarred hotly into the dark ceramic walls.

‘
NO MORE!’
Malik screamed.

Shoots of
water erupted from the pit all around him, flooding the room in
exploding columns like geysers. Malik was suddenly in a whirlpool,
fighting for breath against the turning density of black water.
Penelope drifted closer like a ghost, shimmering in the splash and
eruptive spills, reaching out for him.

‘
We have to
sleep now Malik…’

‘
Who was
she?’ Vance’s voice returned. ‘Focus Malik!’

But he could
not. The freezing water threatened to asphyxiate him. Blasts of it
sprayed like a hurricane, and the codex of the chaos cipher
emanated through the waters like hot crimson wires.

‘
Concentrate!’

Penelope’s
face was no longer there. She had only the shadow outline, a
blackened pit opened in her skull, the endless void of the
Charybdis, swallowing light coalescing into an ocular crown,
searing now, burning, and pulling apart the room. Malik screamed as
he entered it. He roared as he heard its dull bass tones and became
the dense blackness itself.

And for a
moment nothing more.

When Vance
had him pulled from the sensorium chamber Malik was dry as a bone,
yet his skin was pale, as though he’d suffered his hallucinations
physically, his lips a dark blue, eyes sunken and
febrile.

Two Adamoss
avatars lay him out in a recovery room, and Vance was waiting by
his side in the dimly lit private space, waiting for him to
awaken.

‘
Your
memories are jumbled, Malik,’ said Vance. ‘Nothing makes any sense
in there. It’s as though you’ve been living in a house of mirrors.
All I see are ghosts.’

Malik opened
his eyes wearily.

‘
You’ve made
history my brother. You’ve come closer to a black hole’s event
horizon than anyone else without falling in. And there’s nothing I
can learn from you. The whole Erebus project…the whole
investment…the very meaning of your existence has been a sham.’ And
Vance sighed disappointedly. ‘You were created in a very crazy time
in human history.’

‘
My life has
value!’ Malik croaked.

‘
Not without
purpose,’ Vance stated aggressively. ‘We invested everything on the
Erebus. My parents grew you for this purpose before I was
conceived. Imagine what it was like Malik. Living with you, the
clone, the egotistical gene-freak Titan, test-tube built for the
Erebus project. Always living in your shadow, never receiving the
normal compassion and upbringing, I so yearned. Mother and father
never cared for you Malik. You were a way for the family name to
enter the history books. That’s all. I inherited the future…you
were never even supposed to come home.’

Malik glared
fiercely, hands shaking, adrenaline rising. Suddenly, he found
himself unable to move. Vance leaned a little closer until he was
over him.

‘
The
neurophase,’ he sniggered, ‘I have your mind, Malik. You’re my
puppet. I have your thoughts. You must be so conflicted by that
now, you know. I wonder what it feels like to hate me one moment,
want me dead, and then love me the next. Do you love
me?’

Malik
struggled, lips peeling hatefully over his teeth, spittle foaming
at the lips he answered. ‘Y-yhu-yessss!’ And he meant it. He
suddenly couldn’t understand his hatred but it wouldn’t go
away.

‘
Will you
lick my boots?’

‘
Yu-yissth!’

Vance
delighted with laughter. ‘Of course, I’m just playing with you
brother. Consider it a sample of my power. It’s a fraction of what
I can do with your thoughts now. But not to worry, I won’t need to
do it again providing you give me what I want.’

‘
What?’ Malik
growled.

‘
Tell me
about Penelope Hurt,’ he said. ‘Tell me about the chaos cipher.’
And Vance leaned over with a napkin and dabbed Malik’s
lips.

‘
The chaos
cipher was designed by her,’ he told Vance at last, fatigued from
his mental torment. ‘She was its architect.’

‘
What does it
do?’ Vance asked sharply.

‘
It maps
dimensional rifts in space time.’

‘
You’re not
telling me anything. That’s a word salad to me. How does it
work?’

‘
The
quantics!’ Malik seethed. ‘There was an explosion on the Erebus.
And we lost someone. They were outside, working the tests. He
fell.’

‘
He fell?’
Vance repeated.

‘
Into the
Charybdis.’ Malik explained, eyes burning with hate. ‘He fell
inside. We were recovering our orbit. We fell very close ourselves,
over two Schwarzschild radii of the event horizon. Dathan Fallows
was gone. But he was communicating to us. We thought it was
impossible. But he was. He was.’

‘
How?’ asked
Vance.

‘
Superluminal
communication,’ Malik said. ‘Your commercialised entanglement
communicators were allowing him to send messages, the same data
stream that was feeding back information from the atomic clock
tests. He’d hacked it, managed to send a message out to us. It was
text only, no sound. Primitive. But something was getting
out.’

‘
Go
on.’

‘
We didn’t
know at the time…the entangled counterpart on the Erebus, the other
communicator was bringing through more than just Dathan’s
messages…it was leaking gravitational radiation. The whole Erebus
was infected with gravitational ripples, temporal
Doppler’s.’

‘
Temporal
Doppler’s? You mentioned those during your memory hike.’

‘
It’s the
name we gave the phenomenon.’ Malik breathed anxiously. ‘That’s why
you can’t make sense of my memories, Vance. Because time was
fractured, moments stretched and warped wherever there was a
Quantic device. The future, the past, the present, all mingled.
This is true Chronoshock. We were lost in a maze of time, meeting
future and past selves. A house of mirrors. And Penelope saved us.
She saw the pattern. She understood the process and how to move
around this maze of convoluted time and space.’

‘
Then what
happened? What process?’

‘
To survive!’
He gasped, his eyes lost in the depths of his horrified memories, a
resurgent flashback he’d have lived long without wanting to
revisit. ‘She assigned each of us a code. We were to write it on
the walls. I was X and I, she was zero and phi, Captain Zemi took
the theta mark, Scott took the ampersand. We coded the walls,
changing the colour of our marker pens, chalk or manner of
inscription all changed on an hourly basis as instructed by
Penelope. We’d watch how time shifted them around, vanishing as
that part of the wall fell into the past, or aging as it moved into
the future, new symbols appearing out of nowhere, our future
inscriptions. She saw the pattern, was able to construct our future
tagging, getting us from moment to moment despite how infinitely
complex it all seemed. She got us to the cryonic facilities. There
were deaths along the way. Mistrust. Mutiny. Confusion still, as
our future selves accidentally leaked compromising information,
thinking they were sharing the same space-time as their present
companions. When you see yourself…when you meet yourself in the
hallways, I can’t explain the terror of remembering both moments,
existing in both moments while being one consciousness. But when
you meet your friend in a past moment, neither one of you are sure
which is living ahead or behind the other. Until you learn…which of
you knows a little bit more. And how much that imparted knowledge
then informs the inevitable bootstrap paradoxes of unavoidable
events. Once it’s out…neither can control the wake of its chaos, so
we learned all too late to remain stoic.

‘
Zemi had to
rip up half the Erebus just to ascend out of orbit. We purged fuel
cells, radiation shield plating, shuttles, and half an environment
just to get to a safe orbital location. I felt sick from the
gravity. But we made it Vance, thanks to Penelope and the chaos
cipher.’ Malik inched his head off the pillow. ‘The code!’ He said.
‘That code was her legacy. If somebody can understand it the way
she did…we could permeate the limits of time. That’s what we
returned to earth with. That’s how meaningful our lives are. We
have knowledge that can impart and inform our future anew. We can
begin a new paradigm, not the Second Horizon…but the next dimension
entirely. We could become gods.’