Chaos Cipher (92 page)

‘
Malik,’
Vance whispered fearfully. ‘What’s happening?’

‘
Malik is not
a name I care to hear,’ he admonished. ‘This is how the birth of a
God looks. I am Mekho Serat.’ And Vance beheld his black glassy
eyes, a pit that swallowed all light, glassed with an immaculate
surface.

‘Mekho
Serat?’ Vance said, his face twitching into an irritable
blinker.

‘
If the Serat
name is to make any more legendary frontiers, should it matter if
the name is Malik or Vance when both are Serat? I am now the limits
of this world, Vance. My world!’

‘
The HELL you
are!’ Vance bellowed.

But the
Mekhos Serat monster was not a beast tamed by the superficialities
of Atominii order. Vance was hurled off the floor as a black cube
appeared out of nowhere, hitting his exo-suit like a truck. It
seemed to come from Malik’s chest, or the space in front of Malik,
vanishing a moment later as though it had crossed a dimensional
road into their world on its way to some other area. Vance was
thrown back, and the same cube reappeared behind him, flying now in
a vertical direction, this time hurling Vance to the side before it
slipped out of the physical world. Vance huffed as he hit the
floor, the whirring mechanisms of his exo-suit strained from the
impact. He’d been tossed around like a child’s play thing,
glissading to a stop in the sand, almost forty feet from his
origin.

‘
VANCE!’ he
heard Filipe call.

Vance Serat
lifted his head in time to see the cube appear in the sky, sliding
down towards Filipe at an angle as he ran to help. Its shape
changed the lower it got, narrowing into a thinner and thinner
plate as it shot obliquely towards him and by the time it reached
Filipe’s shoulder level, it was roughly the size of a fast moving
wire. And Filipe dropped to the floor dead, his head rolling from a
spill of blood, the shape gone.

Vance’s
exo-suit was low of power, much of it expended bolstering shield
responses to sudden impacts. Crawling now Vance, gasped for air,
desperate to make distance. He looked back at the Mekho Serat that
was his brother, the large cube construct disassembling into random
shapes behind him, slipping out of existence. And the V-TOLs and
Chinooks in the area started to implode, crushed into fireballs by
the compacting motion of opposite moving obsidian blocks slipping
in and out of the world he knew as reality. Mekho began walking
towards Vance.

‘
Malik,’
Vance screamed back at him, unable to shift the massive exo-suit
now. ‘I know you’re still in there, Malik. Don’t kill your only
brother. Don’t let this happen, Malik. We can do this together. You
are a Serat. I’m proud of you, Malik. I had no idea what your
discoveries meant to our world.’

Mekho Serat’s
feet crunched through the sand. He was orbited now by tens of small
black spheres the size of marbles. They spun around him in a belt,
playfully changing pace and direction, each caught up in the spin
of the other, deviated by the space of the last.

‘
What are
these things I see?’ he squalled in the dusty wind. ‘Are my head
wires corrupted? Are you somehow interfacing with my neurophase? Is
that what the chaos cipher does? ANSWER ME!’

‘
It doesn’t
matter either way,’ Mekho Serat’s voice sailed, orbited by the
shape shifting black multiforms. ‘We are on the precipice of
evolution, Vance. And Evolution does not favour our perspectives on
reality. Every time you interface with the Nexus have you not been
even vaguely aware of that fact you silly little
infant?’

Vance backed
away fearfully, crawling and pushing his palms into the sand as his
brother’s cybernetic apparition closed.

‘
It matters
very little how reality presents itself to us on the surface of
things. Do you really wish to try and discern the complexities of
what lies beneath this surface? You couldn’t grasp it,
Vance.’

‘
But if
nothing’s real,’ Vance whimpered, ‘why should I fear
you?’

‘
You should
not take your perceptive outlook on reality literally, fool,’ the
Mekho Serat grinned. ‘But do take it, seriously.’

‘
I was
ignorant, Malik!’ He screamed, closing his eyes and bowing into the
sand. ‘I could not have known. Alright? I was ignorant.’

Mekho Serat’s
feet stood into the sand now inches from Vance and he opened his
eyes again to see them, black veins threading under pale skin,
obsidian toe nails glittering with some ethereal
technology.

‘
Forgive me,
Malik,’ he squalled, craning his head to his new God. ‘Please. I’m
old and I thought I had experience. I thought the years I gained on
you, gave me all I needed to rule. I was short sighted, brother. I
had no idea. Forgive me.’

Mekho Serat
looked disgusted. His face grimaced into a scowl as though he’d
just trodden bare foot into dog shit. His pure crepuscular eyes
told of no sympathy, they told no direction of sight, they were
only forever unlit caliginous orbs.

‘
I forgive
you, Vance.’ He finally stated. ‘I forgive you again…and again…and
again. I am for giving.’

Vance bowed
his head dolefully back into the sand, knowing the irony in his
tone had made his own words seem like a foreshadowing of this very
moment, a moment Vance was coming to believe was his final
destination.

‘
I’m only
sorry you would not let me give you so much more.’

‘
You are so
great,’ Vance pleaded. ‘You are so very great, Malik. You are my
brother. You are truly a Serat.’

‘
You’re a
great disappointment to me Vance,’ said the voice of the Mekhos.
‘Do you respect me?’

Vance raised
his head, eyes brimming with shock and awe. He ground his teeth and
pushed against the technology of the exo-suit that had since
powered down to become his inextricable cage.

‘
Respect
you?’ he reverentially opined. ‘You are the great Mekho Serat. You
have surpassed the limits of space and time. I worship
you.’

Mekhos began
to laugh, his bemused features regarding Vance as an unusual
specimen.

‘
Perhaps,
you’d like to lick my feet as well?’

Vance looked
wearily at Malik’s feet and felt obliged to make the attempt and
then Mekhos Serat stepped away from him.

‘
Don’t,’ he
seethed angrily. ‘You cowering pathetic clod. The things you do for
power sickens me. All these years, your ideologies have been based
on the premise of belief. I’m here to tell you Vance the age of
belief is at an end. There will be no more of it. No more
philosophy. No more pretentions to pseudo thought. No more
ignorance. There will only be painful agonising truth, unabashedly
in its purity, not truth as an aspect filtered by belief. Belief
will have no room in my world. My world is the age of knowing. And
in my world, there will be only enough room for one Serat. He
controls the Hypermekhos.’

Vance pleaded
for mercy as the black orbs that circled Malik’s body shot out to
support his suit. Each black sphere began to stretch and warp into
long metallic spires, wedging his listless melded body up from the
floor, standing him at last. They fired around him, smashing
against the armour, and each collision castellated the casing,
prying it open, reposing Vance of his protection. He dropped out of
the armoured suit and kowtowed unctuously, as it tore away like tin
foil in the warping moving shapes of the Hypermekhos, a machine he
was coming to understand had full advantage over their three
dimensional world. And as he abased himself obsequiously before the
Mekho Serat, Vance began to tear.

‘
I’m sorry,
Malik. I should have listened. You are my brother, Malik. My
brother.’

‘
Remember how
we were raised, Vance?’ Malik said. ‘You were always so clean, so
neat and tidy. I took pleasure in destroying your things. I took
great pains to adjust to our parents regime of order and tidiness
and routine. Oh how I craved disorder. - Ode to Joy,’ Mekhos
remembered suddenly, holding his hand aloft. And two parallel
plates ascended from the ground, black metal yawning into the air
like sheet-steel drawn out of water. And the square parallel plates
closed to Vance’s shoulders. Suddenly, Vance was
piggy-in-the-middle to parts of a super dimensional machine with no
chance of escape.

‘
What sort of
brutish philistine endures such an ironically joyless symphony in
an attempt to impress his own sibling?’ said the Mekho Serat. ‘Have
you never heard Rossini? Or Vivaldi? Even the mocking flirtations
of Mozart have more class than such dead-hearted pleas for
veneration.’ And Mekhos waited a moment as Vance glared on, eyes
watery, simmering with fear, paused in the confusion of a long
silence. But the Mekhos did not hear silence, he heard the La Gazza
Ladra overture, now parading through his mind, a final and
befitting
fuck you
to the cyberlord of a sterile and static world. For Vance,
the waiting was excruciating, those two huge parallel mirrors at
either side of him, shifting amorphously in size and depth, yet
always those two flat sides facing to each of Vance’s
shoulders.

‘
I was born
for greatness,’ he told Vance. ‘The Erebus crew was meant for the
veneration you stole from us. They grew me in a laboratory so I
could fulfil the destiny of heroism, returning to answer all fields
of scientific inquiry. Even though your world has forgotten me,
I’ll make them remember. They’ll see our sacrifice again. And
they’ll call us heroes.’

A zephyr
shifted the sands around them and beneath the hovering impossible
objects, and Mekho Serat sighed, growing weary of Vance who cared
only for his own survival and not the profundity of his words. So,
Malik Serat decided then.

‘We’re
done…’

-And clenched
his fingers into a tight fist. Instantly the plates obediently
magnetised, compressing Vance between them in a splash of bodily
fluid that sprayed out a crimson strip across the ground.
Everything that was once a man vanished with the plates into some
unknowable corner of the Hypermekhos, down in the invisible folding
sub realities. A thin strip of Vance’s blood had painted a narrow
vertical red mark down Malik’s face. The pressure of the
compression sprayed a red line for almost eight hundred meters.
With laden eyes Mekho Serat glared at the vast white desert baking
in the blue skies ahead, a plane now absent of Vance Serat and
indeed all other life, as he let Rossini’s overture conclude. All
he heard now was the pulsing droning beat of the Charybdis black
hole.

‘
Au revior,
Vance, the Eternal.’

-75-

T
he Nova Storm eased down through
the fierce winds and Raven and Nitro stared pensively from the view
screen as streams of rainwater blasted over the canopy. They bobbed
and rocked in the turbulence.

‘
We’re close
to the position,’ Nitro informed.

‘
Any
SAM’s?’

‘
Nothing
yet,’ Nitro said, ‘no missile defences, no sky-mines,
nada.’

‘
Keep thine
eyes attentive,’ Raven said, his strands of grey and white hair
thick like frost in front of his bright and cold green eyes. ‘Our
mission has yet the vicissitudes of vulnerability.’

‘
Don’t worry
about it, big guy,’ Nitro smiled confidently. ‘We got
this.’

The Nova
Storm’s scanners swept the pelagic black waves that rocked and
bulged as far as the naked eye could see and yet nothing else was
visible on the ocean save the occasional basalt atolls peaking
beyond an unstable surface.

The canopy
had grown unsettlingly silent, only the whir of the Nova Storm’s
engines filled the space as the warrior allowed Nitro the time to
reflect.

‘
Sometimes, I
wonder, what the hell’s keeping me here,’ Nitro confessed
loquaciously while sitting back. ‘Nothing,’ he told himself
forlornly. ‘Nada.’

Raven shut
his eyes again.

‘
Do you have
any kids, Raven?’ he asked, but the Olympian maintained his
discretion.

Raven did not
reply.

‘
I grew up in
Chicago suburbs fostered by many father figures. People at war with
themselves who found uses for my talents. I learned how to make
explosives. I used to blow up small fury animals, squirrels, rats,
birds.’

‘
Then thou
were a very cruel and troubled and unfeeling youth.’ Raven
muttered, eyes still shut.

‘
Yeah,’ Nitro
agreed. ‘One day, I joined the Syridan army, fighting to protect
the Atominii states and the hardlands. I was part of a peacekeeper
division. I always wanted to help. My wife…she started getting
involved in hardland politics and they took her away. I never saw
her again. This child…our child was just six years old. I don’t get
it…I never understood why they took the kid, y’know.’

The Olympian
warrior slowly opened his green eyes again as his contemplative
meditation grew disturbed.

‘
I have
advice for you,’ he said.

‘
What?’