Chaos Cipher (9 page)

She paced
along the stone walkways out onto the veranda and Daryl followed
her to the sound of running water, which pattered from the leaves
and hanging vegetation, collecting in the aquaponic drainage points
of the building for recirculation. Enaya looked out at the city and
thought about where they were going, this young, vibrant and
growing world of peace.

The dome and
surrounding villages were regionally segregated for logistical
purposes. Like East B’ One, every other local region in Cerise
Timbers operated using the same federated structural philosophy. It
was not autocratic communism at the driving wheel, nor was it some
authoritarian or liberalist capital force, but a people’s
sociocracy, coordinated, holacratically organised, directed freely
and engaged. Taking federal tenure was not a full time vocation
here, nor did it take much of Enaya’s day while she was in office
since the duties were not time consuming and ultimately up to her.
Enaya often felt the role of coordinator was a philosophical
practice of facilitating the will of the people, while getting to
know the various affiliated groups in her local area. She had
started a personal study about their consensus operation for Q-net
publications so that anybody could read the success and failures
and how failures, if possible, were resolved. Like all coordinators
it was her goal to resolve complex situations and arguments when
conflicts occurred. Collaborative processes were sometimes slow and
it was her job to get things moving faster, taking leadership when
justified or expected.

Their
paradigm was based on anarchist principles, traditional
libertarianism which meant absolute authority was impossible in
Cerise Timbers, the population would not allow for individual
authority unless it was testably justified by a strong burden of
proof. Authority, however, was proportionally distributed between
teams and roles such as hers, meaning decisions were made locally
and not for the entire city while always accountable to the super
majority.

When she
wasn’t chairing meetings and facilitating discussions in the
various syndicates, Enaya was organising workshops and inviting new
comers to learn about their way of life, training them and getting
them to realise their full potential or involving them in
educational workshops and how to use the Quantic Syn-Dex to seek
out duties and city contributions when they wanted to get involved.
She sometimes found new comers from the Atominii were used to
authority, and took a little longer to liberate into their new
roles of self-development and responsibility, so they needed more
attention, however most successfully found their feet.

Unusually for
an anarchist paradigm, Cerise Timbers had a constitution. She had
been told that the original idea of the city was about trust and
solidarity, but for new comers the message was confusing and vague
since they had not been part of the original uprising and had been
spoiled in their life time by Atominii services. The constitution
was based on three principles of freedom, thought and pleasure,
written up to motivate people and to lay out the rules of their
sociocracy clearly; to contribute to bettering Cerise Timbers for
all, and to have an impact on decisions to the proportion and
degree they are affected by them. These were some of the rules to
ensure everything done is in the interest of the community and for
enrichment of all. Education was not compulsory, nor was it a
privilege, but a free, ludic and experientially based practice.
People were taught about their rights, mainly, and about how their
system works so new ideas could evolve. Society was informed! Crime
was very low in Cerise Timbers because it was understood here that
crimes often occurred when freedoms were restricted and poverty and
shame was normalised, none of which happened here. Although it
wasn’t perfect, there were still individuals prone to old habits.
The city, however, had not yet failed in rehabilitation, each found
their place and purpose. For those who did not fit well,
communities worked together to exclude such individuals, who could
either find a new community to join or leave the city
altogether.

Work and
labour in the traditional sense was made obsolete here, in Cerise
Timbers new ideas were welcomed, and problem solving was cultural
and altruistic. This agile approach had made the once dirty jobs a
thing of the past since jobs were not held as a single vocation,
and descriptions could be redefined loosely by the syndicates,
depending on who was working with who and to what end. This allowed
for new skills and individual development to be deployed. Duties
appearing on the Syn-Dex database were algorithmically tailored
according to the skill set of an individual. Each had their role in
developing the place, including engineers and mechanics, which
quickly put an end to many unpleasant tasks for all. Many coming
from the hardlands came to learn that work was invested in helping
others here, not a value in-itself and for-itself, but an exercise
in cooperation with others and learning. Their ideology was all
about enjoyment, play, a ludic society. This, she thought, was the
true incentive, for each to leave the world a better place than
where they found it.

There were no
police forces since people by and large were not immediately
recognised as untrustworthy and irresponsible unless given power to
be so. And since nobody was prohibited to their fruits no theft was
necessary. There was only a trained group of defence forces
referred to loosely as the militia. Their military, she knew, was
based on a tribal and clan type logic and specified limited
hierarchy structures led by Mercenaries. Each section of the city
had clan names based on totems such as Otters, Eagles and Bruin.
She was told by the Mercenaries it would sway groups from vying for
power. Since affiliated Eagles in one district would have something
to say about badly behaving Eagle clans in another, the clan
paradigm was used to maintain a social conscience. In East B’ One,
the most common defence clan was the Otter.

There were no
bosses, no managers, all people were equal and recognised so in
their humanity and freedom. Often they had what was called the
shadow boss, a joke that was spread by one of the resident poets as
an ironic homage to their once autocratic rulers.

Enaya was
usually surprised by the many dark tales about Cerise Timbres, as a
world born from the pits of hell, a place spawned from ruin, murder
and torture, a place of great beauty rising from pure filth and
disgrace. Some stories told of a bloated swamp monster that had
devoured humans for centuries until its stomach burst and spewed
forth an egg that hatched and spawned the forest and the city dome
itself. Enaya knew its history, she understood its legacy and
although frightening those stories made sense to her. She thought
back to the mines and the new trouble they now faced. A clash with
the Atominii would be a disaster for them all. Although by no means
a poor city, Cerise Timbers didn’t have the military might to stand
up to such cybernetic power as the Atominii. For the moment, they
held all the cards, the Atominii was the hegemonic power centre of
the world and exo-planets.

‘
It’s a
frightening situation,’ she admitted as she thought about the new
information coming out of the mines. ‘There’s little stopping the
Atominii from destroying us. They’ve flattened hundreds of
precariat cities like ours; the only thing keeping us alive is our
deal with Moscowai.’

Enaya looked
up as a commotion started overhead and some birds flocked from
their nests and showered a spray of water as they soared through
the wet leaves and out of sight.

‘
What about
our new investor?’ Daryl asked. ‘We’ve got him at
least.’

‘
Yeah,’ she
agreed with an uncertain tone, turning back. ‘What’s his name
again? Agent Twain, was it?’

‘
He goes by a
pseudonym,’ said Daryl, ‘but yeah, Agent Twain. You know he
invested over six million Atomons into a portion of our graphite
yield, almost one quarter of it? It’s just sitting there. He’s made
no demands for its extraction, made no attempts to meet with us,
it’s a hell of a lot of crypto-coin to pump into stocks and not
make a demand.’

‘
Perhaps he’s
hoping the resource will go up in value.’ Enaya
speculated.

Daryl stood
to her right and stared into the seamless blue sky. ‘Maybe.’ He
said. ‘Whoever this guy is he’d made his name known to us as Agent
Twain, why do you think he gave us a name at all? He could have
remained completely anonymous…’

‘
Something to
bear in mind,’ she chuckled. ‘Maybe Agent Twain is a code in case
he wants to send people to collect the yield personally.’ And Daryl
began to wonder. ‘What are we using that crypto-coin for, anyway?
We don’t have currency in Cerise Timbers.’

‘
No, but the
Atominii do.’ She said. ‘If our enemies decide to flatten us, then
we’ve at least got monetary coffer to fall back on and everyone
here is a stakeholder. A portion of it has already gone to weapons
for our militia. I read the majority of it will be to secure
boarder passports and give city survivors a decent start-up in the
hardlands should worse come to worse.’

‘
Really?’ he
said with an inflection of surprise. ‘I never read the
reports.’

‘
I’ll mail
them to you,’ Enaya offered, ‘everyone should see it. Uncertainty
is the way of life these days, good to have a plan,
right?’

‘
There are
people around here,’ said Daryl, ‘like the Lewis family who want
that crypto to make this place an Atominii competitor.’

‘
Well,’ Enaya
shrugged, ‘if that’s what the majority want then naturally we’ll
become one, but until the syndicates decide together to agree on
it, then Lewis will have to keep dreaming. Besides, Agent Twain may
not be all that good. This anonymous investor could be trying to
test us and stir trouble. We have to be careful. Greed is a real
divider of interests.’

There were
voices echoing through the room now, and footsteps lightly and
quickly pattering towards them.

‘
Coordinator
Enaya?’ Dak yelled.

‘
Right here,’
she called, walking back inside.

She saw Dak
moving behind the stone pillars looking around and asking
administration operators and gardeners if they had seen Enaya
Chahuán when someone pointed to the veranda where she stood with
Daryl.

‘
Enaya,’ Dak
said, his face taut with an attempted smile, ‘I need to see
you.’

‘
Goodness,
Dak,’ she chuckled, ‘you’re running around in this weather. Slow
down, what’s wrong?’

A moment
later Sonja Jenner and Boris Isaac also arrived holding the
infant’s life pod between them as an almost
presentation.

‘
We found a
signal coming from Onyx Waters,’ Dak began to explain. ‘So I
thought I’d go out and take a look around.’

‘
I thought
Onyx Waters was raided by Blue Lycans?’ the senior coordinator said
from Enaya’s right side.

‘
It was,’ Dak
confirmed. ‘We thought there might be survivors beaconing for
help.’

‘
We weren’t
wrong,’ Sonja spoke.

‘
What do you
have there?’ Enaya asked.

Together they
rested the pod gently on a nearby table and opened the capsule.
Enaya seemed ambivalently occupied on the device as she stepped
closer and discerned at last the sleeping child within.

‘
A baby?’ she
said in almost a whisper.

‘
Not just a
baby,’ said Boris with ironic enthusiasm. ‘He’s an Olympian
Genetic.’

She put her
fingers gently on the fabric and leaned in to listen to the child’s
irregular feather light breaths.

‘
The
mother?’

‘
Deceased,’
said Dak wearily. ‘We think. We don’t even know if the woman was
the mother or…I don’t know. She was dead whoever she
was.’

Enaya Chahuán
looked anxiously back at her friend and advisor Daryl and the older
man stepped close and ran his Quantic-W arm device over the
baby.

‘
A tail?’ he
said in disbelief. The man held the sleeve of his arm over the
child and optically magnified the phenomenon onto the material.
‘Well I’ll be god-damned. A Gene-freak!’

Enaya started
to become febrile. ‘We can’t have an Olympian Genetic here
Dak.’

‘
I know’ said
Dak. ‘They’re globally banned; I thought they were all banished
from the Earth?’

‘
Apparently
not,’ Enaya added indignantly. ‘You said you found a Blue Lycan? I
heard they were Olympian warriors.’

‘
Enaya,’ said
Daryl gently ‘this causes a bit of a problem. It’s pitiful that
this infant is a victim of parricide and doubly so to be in this
new situation. But if this child is detected...’

‘
I’m very
aware of the consequences.’ Enaya said bluntly.

‘
We can’t put
him back…’ Sonja said. ‘I won’t do that.’

Enaya gently
closed the pod again and sealed the child into his silent
cocoon.

‘
Here’s the
problem,’ she said carefully, then turned to face them with a
remorseful countenance. ‘Daryl and I were just discussing that our
mines are running dangerously low. The resources we supply to the
Atominii are what stop them from making a military playground out
of this place. That’s what sets us apart from other precariat
zones.