Chapter 28
New Words
Farital wore a tattered, stained robe over his wrinkled skin and bones. Sitting on a dusty couch in what used to be a reading room of what used to be an opulent mansion, he looked through the open doorway from his room to where Citizen Vaiss paced impatiently. Vaiss walked back and forth in front of an array of complicated radio and communications equipment the likes of which the world wouldn’t know what to do with. Most of the world anyway. A dozen flat monitors were at that station, a handful showing data feeds and graphs that changed as information was collected. The remaining screens were in a power-saving mode, and all of the other equipment hummed and whirred and buzzed electronically.
Vaiss had been aggravated lately as bad news piled in day after day. Before that the Citizen had been darkly excited for weeks, when there were people on those screens regularly talking to him and cementing their roles. People from all over Davranis and Horebaxi, a few from the Tribeslands as well. Most of them had volunteered for the cause, some had even supplied animal and human subjects to become blurred, and all wanted a chance to manipulate the Cypher to their advantage. Vaiss made promises, concessions, trades, all of which would end up broken or lopsided to his benefit at a later date.
As of a week ago, things were progressing smoothly according to the messages and reports coming in. However, the last few days had become a series of ill-fated actions by ill-fated people, all from the attempt to kill the Saint and those with him. Fartital had been around Vaiss long enough to know that a few of those failures were planned, but not all of them.
The door to the sitting room had been removed so that Farital could see this world changing as Vaiss “fixed” it. That meant the old man had information on all of the machinations centered here, and no one to share it with, no way to help Saint Dastou or his people.
He peered down past his long, ratty beard and to his metal shackles. The cuffs, recently replaced because of weight loss due to starvation, meant whatever he wanted to do would fail, his chains keeping him bound here. He woke, lived, and slept in a cycle of regret, self-pity, and self-loathing that added heft to the restraints. Farital saw his name chiseled into the new, smooth dark metal. It was his former name, one he didn’t care about any longer. That man had done terrible things, unforgivable acts against nature, against the purpose of science, and he would never forgive himself. Neither would Vaiss for other reasons, and that was expected – the Citizen was not human enough to be forgiving, and too dedicated to care about becoming so.
Tired of looking at his damned name, Fartital focused on the monitors with all that collating information. He couldn’t read anything from here – his eyesight had never been quite perfect – but he could tell the standard shape of what was on two of the screens. One was a series of colored bars, numbers lining the left and bottom. As he watched, a bar to the far right of the screen moved two pips up, a meaningless change without context. Another very familiar graph featured several thick, colored lines going from their zero point somewhere on the left border and flowing, curving where the data indicated. The reason that graph was familiar was because Farital was one of the ones that helped design it. It was a flow chart of variances in brain chemicals, meant to track the information for a single individual and easily compare it to others. It wasn’t the graph shape or colors that stood out, that could be anything, really. But the way the graphs flowed and changed near constantly was incredibly familiar, and was exactly how he remembered brain chemicals flowing and changing based on stimuli and environment.
He lost where he was and who he was now looking at those screens, which always happened. It was like a drug, a needle full of pure nostalgia. Before he let himself indulge once again, one of the unpowered monitors winked on, changing from a black display to a man’s face. Vaiss walked in front of that monitor, where an attached camera would pick him up clearly.
“Yes?” Vaiss asked, annoyed and impatient. “Is there a problem?”
The man on the screen’s collar was a familiar dark-green with a sliver of white piping that Farital recognized as one of Blackbrick’s two new military uniforms, the one for their navy. Much of that city’s leadership had also volunteered to join Vaiss, though the conversations about what was traded for the alliance occurred elsewhere and Farital did not know what the Citizen pledged to them.
“We’re close to our destination,” said the man, speaking fast after sensing his leader’s irritation, “on schedule, but there is a craft coming closer.”
“What kind of craft?” the Citizen asked, his aggravation complimented by a hopeful tilt.
“We’re not sure. It’s small, barely a blip for us right now. Eighty miles away.”
“Miles?” Farital mouthed soundlessly. That was imperial measurement, antiquated. It had been replaced and labeled futile. Did Vaiss seek it out in his limited Null Bank? Yes, it made sense, a way to not have his enemies understand measurements or distances. A brilliant precaution, the old man had to admit.
“When will they catch up?” Vaiss asked, intrigued.
“At their angle and all speeds combined,” answered the uniformed man, “five hours from now. We can destroy them before they reach us.”
“Don’t.” Vaiss sounded almost jovial before taking a moment to think. “Send me that vessel’s designation within your monitoring systems and I will in return send you a code string that will make it invisible to radar and communications. Input that code where my accompanying instructions tell you and thereafter ignore the craft. Tell anyone who asks that it was an error and has been fixed.”
“Er, yes, sir,” the sailor said, confused. “But if that’s an enemy...”
“Do as I say,” Vaiss interrupted. “Do not act in any way against whomever that may be, do not contact them if you see they have radio communications. Input my code string and tell all other operators to do the same.”
“Yes, sir, of course,” said the uniformed man rapidly, stiffly.
Vaiss waved him away and the man’s screen blinked off. Then the Citizen looked into Farital’s room, and smiled.
“Not everything has gone against me today, it seems,” Vaiss said to Farital.
Normally at the direct sight of that disgustingly empty face, Farital would look back down to his shackles and the dirty floor where he had occasionally urinated out of fear or pain. Not this time, but the old man didn’t quite know why. The men kept a strange eye contact as Vaiss, without a smile or any readable expression, walked across the living space he was using for his communications equipment. His steps ticked against hard wood, echoed above the mild hum of the machines, and entered the sitting room Farital was chained up in.
“It looks like I need you again,” Vaiss said.
Farital knew by now that when he tried to speak, there was a far greater chance of either nothing or a pathetic croak coming from his throat rather than actual words, therefore he opted to make no attempt at speech. There was no point, really, as he knew what the falsely blank look in Vaiss’ eyes meant.
“Will you comply this time,” asked the Citizen, “take pencil to paper and give it to me? Have you finally learned where this world is headed?”
Farital had truly hoped that the man on the screen came with such disastrous news that Vaiss would have to abandon large aspects of his plan. No, that was foolish. That plot was too long in the making for a mere few days of occasional mishaps to derail it. Farital finally stared at his shackles, though not out of fear or a selfish, pointless hope to be ignored. He scanned again and again the name clearly imprinted into them: Junal Bin-Haak. He used to wish he had been killed far into his past, when he had that name, when he had a life that mattered.
When Farital was Bin-Haak, a scientist, a man of education and progress, he knew when an experiment was falling apart. The information gained would still be useful, so he continued in order to have the results cataloged. He forced himself back to that part of his mind, and tried to combine it with everything Vaiss made him overhear lately as an insult
, and realized that the plans were falling apart. The Citizen could do small things to hurt the Sainthood, kill members of their kind, but now he was trying to do much more, and his ambition created numerous, varied points of failure that he was too arrogant to notice.
Farital could see now, not with superb clarity, but it was there. A string was loose, and the tapestry of planning Vaiss had put together had a fair chance of coming completely apart.
After giving his victim a moment to ponder, Vaiss spoke again. “I need the chime. I need to know exactly what it is and how to implement it.”
The chime? Farital’s mind spun, trying to remember what Vaiss could be talking about. Chime, sound, a type of sound. No, a combination of sounds, combinations of small sounds maybe, what could be referred to as chimes or a chime. Then, he hit on it, remembered a mechanism that involved musical tones, a type of audible, deeply-affecting hypnotism. Farital, or rather his former self, helped create it. The experiment never had an official name because it was prone to failure, the suggestion impossible to program, to control, with severe brain damage the result far too often to be viable. However, it was highly malleable in parts, and the larger project was scrapped and used as a sort of basic reference to other, more useful, less ambitious audible suggestive devices. Vaiss did not name the smaller, successful projects that branched away from the chime. Did he truly want the failed whole, the meaningless, brain-rotting audible cue?
“I see,” Vaiss said, interpreting the silence as Farital put together his thoughts to be a lack of compliance. “Then we will do what we always do. And I will get what I want as you are near death.”
Vaiss picked up Farital by the throat suddenly, and pushed him around pieces of furniture to the middle of the back wall. The Citizen let his victim go, then walked away, heading out of the room. Past the door, Vaiss pressed a button, and then came the familiar klink-klank-klink of a pulley system inside the walls of this house. The pulleys were attached to the chains that bound Farital, and after a few seconds, the slack was going away, the chains dragged inside the walls. The links of the restraints clinked as they disappeared from view. In another few seconds, the shackles were tight enough to pull up the man they held, and did that until Farital was in a t-pose. He was standing up mostly on his own, but that would, as always, not be the case for long.
Vaiss moved away, his footsteps receding. The Citizen said he had to create some code string, meaning Farital had time before his torture would begin. So be it, thought Farital, let the pain come. The chime could be changed and Vaiss had no idea. He would give in to the torture, as he had often in the past. This time, rather than lamenting, he planned. The Citizen would cut and burn and hit, and Farital would take the punishment with his body and one part of his mind. The remainder of his intellect would create a working variation of the chime to go against what Vaiss wanted, and Farital would have to give in when the job was done, no sooner.
However, this was not a task for the haggard, broken man killed and revived by Vaiss so often he no longer knew what death was, had no fear of it – it was welcome relief more than anything. This was work meant for the long forgotten soul within, the dissident that tried to end what is now called the Social Cypher before it began in earnest. To deceive Vaiss into implementing a weapon pointed in a different direction than the man wanted, Farital would have to summon the man he was when they called him Junal Bin-Haak, borrow that life and mind – if only for the moment.
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Blurred Weaponry (Saints of the Void, Book 1) Page 40
