Uroboros Saga
Book one
By Arthur Walker
© 2013 Arthur Walker
Cover artwork “Ezra, Silverstein, and Taylor” by Arthur Walker
as arranged by Elle Phillips Design
Chapter 1
Uptown, Port Montaigne - Human Health Services Division of Uroboros Financial
2:05 PM, December 19th, 2199 – Days before shutdown
Dr. Barnes checked his watch. His patient was at least five minutes late, something he thought him incapable. The door swung open a moment later, startling the doctor. He hadn’t even heard him come into his secretary’s office.
“Nice sign,” he said, hooking his thumb back over his shoulder.
“Sorry about that,” Dr. Barnes said, gesturing to the couch. “She won a trip to the lunar colony resorts and needed a few days off on short notice. The sign directing people to just come on back is usually more useful than a temp,”
He took off his suit jacket first, laying it across the back as neatly as he could. Then, pulling up the cuffs of his slacks slightly, he sat down. Dr. Barnes pulled out his stylus and slate to start taking notes, pausing to adjust the shades so it was dimmer in the room.
“Kale, what would you like to talk about today?” Dr. Barnes said, pushing his glasses back up his nose.
“God,” Kale replied looking over at the book shelf.
“That’s a deeper subject than what usually possesses you. I see you’ve been letting your hair grow. Has HR been after you about that?” Dr. Barnes said, taking a few notes on his slate.
“I met Him. I didn’t want to, but it was absolutely necessary,” Kale replied, his eyes gliding over the covers of the ancient books on the shelves.
“God?”
“Yes.”
“Kale, these meetings are for purposes of maintenance only. If you’ve had an incident...” Dr. Barnes tapped the slate with the stylus as if to switch from notes to something else.
“I’d been told I look and sometimes act like Him, more than the others. I took it upon myself to emulate His values, see to His agenda,” Kale continued, folding his hands neatly on his knees.
“Assuming we’re talking about the same person, yes, you look like him I suppose. Do you really consider him to be God?” Dr. Barnes asked, his eyebrow raised slightly with concern.
Kale thought about the question for a moment, his dark eyes turning eerily toward Dr. Barnes, who averted his own gaze. Kale bowed his head slightly and stood up to inspect the books on the shelf more closely.
“Did you get new books?” Kale asked.
“Nope, same as I’ve always had,” Dr. Barnes replied.
Kale nodded slowly then looked back over his shoulder at the doctor.
“If you were me, what would you call Him?” Kale asked.
“I take your point with this view, but do you think that such a belief serves you in any way?” Dr. Barnes questioned, reasserting the couch invite.
Kale shook his head.
“It wasn’t about me. I wanted to see His vision of things made manifest. I sought no reward and expected no exaltation. The reward would have been in seeing the task through to fruition. I hoped only to understand as He understands. To see Him as He sees Himself,” Kale hissed, passing his fingertips across the spines of the books.
“You said you saw him? What do you mean by that? A vision or...”
Kale laughed, startling Dr. Barnes.
“No. Nothing like that. I really saw Him, stood in the same space as they say, and asked Him a difficult question,” Kale said, his cruel smile quickly fading from his face.
“Kale, I think you should submit yourself to a more rigorous examination. There are safeguards that make what you are saying difficult or impossible,” Dr. Barnes replied as he wrote nervously.
“Do you? Don’t you want to know what I asked Him, and what His reply was?” Kale whispered harshly as he returned to the couch.
“Okay. What did you ask him?” Dr. Barnes asked worriedly.
“I’ll paraphrase. I asked Him if He still intended to keep His promise, and to fulfill destiny. He replied by saying He only hoped He could keep from devouring Himself,” Kale said sadly, looking up piously.
Dr. Barnes couldn’t understand what was happening. He’d sent the signal for armed response minutes ago and no one had arrived yet. He could tell Kale was dangerously unhinged, but didn’t understand how he could have done what he claimed.
“What did he look like?” Dr. Barnes asked, stalling for time.
“Oh, He looked as I do, but far more well-traveled and at the same time fearful. It was wretched to see Him that way. I believe that we had both been deceived, and that our meeting was not chance. It had been contrived of a shadowy cabal within my own Maker’s institution,” Kale said, leaning back on the couch.
“Deceived? Who do you think has deceived you?” Dr. Barnes asked. He looked nervously up toward the door.
“Human Resources, the board of directors, the acting CEO, and you, my good doctor,” Kale replied coolly.
Dr. Barnes froze. It seemed impossible that Kale could know the things he knows, let alone say them aloud. There were supposed to be safeguards, things to make what was happening right now impossible. Kale had a low rating, and was considered to have only the most minimal absorption.
“You look surprised, Dr. Barnes,” Kale replied, just as though they were discussing the weather.
Dr. Barnes checked his connectivity to the corporate network, but the icon on his slate was gray. Nothing he’d transmitted requesting armed response or Human Resources had gone through for the last ten minutes at least. He decided to play the only card he had.
“Kale, someone is playing you,” Dr. Barnes replied calmly. “None of this is real. You couldn’t have done what you say you did.”
“Oh, I know. I thought I had killed Him at first. In a moment of sheer desperation, feeling more abandoned than I ever have in my very short life, I struck Him down. Like any other man, He bled,” Kale said, bowing his head in genuine remorse.
“That can’t be. I’ve seen him recently via our corporate management meetings. His face was right there among all the other directors on the board. You might have hurt someone you thought was him, but it couldn’t have happened as you’re describing. Let me get you some help,” Dr. Barnes said, resuming his professional decorum.
“Have you ever stood in the same room with Him? Seeing His face rendered by so many pixels across a touch screen or the conference glass in the hallway isn’t really seeing Him. No, I saw Him, and I struck Him,” Kale said, nodding as his eyes grew wide with certitude.
The doctor bolted for the door, but Kale shoved him hard into the bookcase sending many of them to the floor with him. Dr. Barnes turned over grasping for his glasses. Kale grabbed him by his lapels and pushed him back into his chair. Carefully, he put the doctor’s glasses back on his face and his slate and stylus back in his hands.
“Where are you going? I’ve got at least twenty minutes left,” Kale asked sardonically.
Unable to bear the sight, Kale began replacing the books on the shelf, exactly where they were, from memory. Dr. Barnes finally caught his breath as Kale placed the last book on the shelf. Kale was faster and stronger than he had right to be, as if something had awakened programming and capabilities that should have been rendered utterly dormant.
“The takeover. You should have been all rendered incapable of this level of awareness,” Dr. Barnes muttered breathlessly.
“See, that’s wha
t I thought, too. When the rest were demoted or reassigned, I was given something that was so completely opposite my original function. That is when something must have happened. Do you think that the failsafe might itself have a failsafe?” Kale mused as he returned to the couch.
“I’m not afraid of you.” Dr. Barnes rubbed his bruised shoulder.
“I’ve been reading all the sterilized files. I know at least one of my brethren has killed, his quest for the Maker driving him to the brink. At least, that is what anyone with peeking privileges is supposed to think,” Kale said shaking his head as if to scold Dr. Barnes.
“It’s completely true,” Doctor Barnes said with a nod. “One of them did go rogue,”
Kale stood up swiftly covering the distance to where Dr. Barnes sat and leveled a single finger at him, inches from his face. The doctor flinched, holding his hand up defensively. Kale’s mouth was agape as if he were about to start screaming, eyes bulging with anger, and no small amount of frustration. Instead, he stood up erect and straightened his tie.
“Let that be the last lie you ever tell me,” Kale whispered. “I swear, if you tell another, this conversation will end in a way you’d prefer it didn’t.”
Dr. Barnes watched wordlessly as he returned to the couch.
“It was a machine, but not in the way that I, or even you, are a machine. I’m virtually indiscernible from you or your secretary for instance. This thing you say has been doing all the killing is a shameful copy of what I am, disparate and primitive,” Kale said, his hands moving in the air as if to draw some sort of unseen diagram.
“Okay. What does that have to do with anything?” Dr. Barnes asked, his breath quickening.
Kale laughed, a full and bawdy laugh that filled Barnes with a strange anxiety. Whatever Kale had figured out was clearly above his pay grade and he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer now. Kale wiped tears from his eyes with a carefully folded silken hanky fetched from his suit jacket.
“It was all I needed to connect the dots. The takeover, my own misinformation, and the means by which I’d been manipulated. It was hastily done. There were expenses, a trail of paper, and even more than that, there was names and faces and yet more names!” Kale replied, holding his hands out to his sides as if he were giving the doctor a gift.
“These things happen. Finance companies silently take each other over all the time, assets change hands, records are cleansed by the CGG, and the shareholders are none the wiser. It is just business as usual,” Dr. Barnes said, trying to calm the situation.
Kale smiled broadly, lips pressed tightly together, cheeks quivering to grant him a sinister countenance.
“It was simple to make your secretary think she’d won a contest. I expensed the whole thing as a means of sweetening a deal with one of my blessedly few shadow clients. Arranging for your office and associated systems to be offline during our conversation was a little more complex, but so far the effort has been utterly worth it,” Kale said calmly.
Dr. Barnes smiled weakly, hoping this was all some cruel joke. He set the data slate and stylus down and clasped his hands together. He couldn’t pull together everything Kale was saying, but he was certain his normally stable patient had completely lost his mind.
“So, what did you really want to talk about today?” Dr. Barnes asked, his gaze settling on the floor by his feet.
“I wanted to see how much of what was happening beneath the surface of our mutual employer was known to you,” Kale replied.
“And?”
“Your body language and every micro-expression seems to suggest that you knew enough to keep your mouth shut, but when pressed to act in the name of our mutual employer’s behalf, you took a pay bump instead,” Kale stated coldly.
“I didn’t take any sort of--”
“Oh, it was all done very well. An adjustment of your credit rating, lifetime debt records, a slight boost to your yearly access of company stock, and expense reports that just got lost somehow. It was probably handled by one of my brothers in every case. It took weeks for me to untangle,” Kale said, interrupting the doctor.
“Did you kill him? Is he dead?” he asked.
“No, but He cannot continue His work until He sorts a few things out,” Kale replied.
“How do you feel about that?”
“I will simply have to continue His work where I can, subsume corporate resources to that end, and erode the new regime’s power until He is well enough to return. I didn’t mean to harm Him like that, and I’ve only an inkling of what I’m capable of. I will atone for what I’ve done to Him, and there will be those who join me in my endeavor,” Kale said, standing up and pulling on his jacket.
“And those who intend to only get in your way,” Doctor Barnes said, resigned to his fate.
“Intent implies deliberate thought. In most cases it is those thinking the least deliberately that stand in my way the most. Those who do not question authority and our corporate austerities to the lengths they should. I wanted to see Him as He saw Himself, and until I did, I was utterly blind,” Kale said, pulling out his mobile and checking the time.
Kale took Dr. Barnes by the arm and dragged him from the chair. The middle aged man struggled for a moment until Kale could rest his other hand on his head. There was a brief exchange of bio-electric current and Dr. Barnes went completely limp. Kale set him back in his chair and took up his data slate.
He read the doctor’s notes with an amused expression for several minutes until he finally deleted them from the device. Laying the slate down on the table beside the unconscious doctor, Kale turned to the book shelf and selected the tome he’d been eyeing for some time.
“Art and the Creative Unconscious. Oh, I can borrow this? Thank you,” Kale whispered as he exited the office.
When Dr. Barnes awoke, he had no memory of who he was or how he’d gotten there. He could deduce certain things from the degrees hanging on the wall, the data slate in his hand, and the files in his cabinet, but the rest was a mystery. He could only discern from the pictures on the wall and by gazing for a moment at his reflection that he was part of the psychiatric community.
It occurred to him that it would be particularly bad if any of his colleagues discovered he’d lost his faculties.
Chapter 2
Downtown, Port Montaigne – Old Commercial District
11:05 PM, December 17th, 2199
Silverstein’s Log, Part 1
I woke up in an unfamiliar and decidedly dirty place, lying on my side, a blurry smudge poking me with a long aluminum baton. A sharp unrelenting headache spread little motes of light across my optical nerve when I blinked. Reaching up I realized that it was more than something you take aspirin for. Someone had hit me. Hard.
My clothes were soaked with rain and sweat. The baton prodded me again, and the smudge stepped in closer. He took shape as he leaned in to look at me, a white guy in his late 40s, his face adorned with a well-trimmed mustache, dressed in a uniform, and a marvelous rain coat, that in my current state, I couldn’t help but envy.
“Sir, you can’t sleep here,” the uniformed man told me insistently.
Sitting up, I looked around at the red brick alley I was lying in, the dingy walls intermittently illuminated by the red and blue flashing lights at the far end. I lifted my hands up to my face and rubbed my fingers together trying to warm them. I couldn’t say how long I’d laid there, but I was already covered in a fine coating of grit or soot. The uniformed man helped me to my feet and pressed my hand to the smooth glass of his data slate. It blinked in response, briefly illuminating the uniformed man’s face.
“Well, you’ve got no warrant for your arrest and you aren’t registered in the transient report. Sir, I’m going to ask you for ID,” the uniformed man stated impatiently.
I couldn’t even remember what po
cket I kept my wallet. My clothes weren’t familiar, and my obvious confusion at my circumstances only elicited a tired glance from the uniformed man as I fumbled about in my pockets. My right rear pocket was turned inside out, whatever I had stored there was now missing. I tried to explain that I didn’t have ID, bringing my hand up to my head.
The uniformed man winced as I pushed my hair back searching for the source of the pain.
“Sir, you’ve got a nasty head wound. There’s a clinic nearby. I’ll give you a ride,” the uniformed man said pulling on some latex gloves.
He helped me toward his transport by the arm. His vehicle marked ‘POLICE’ in big white letters hummed faintly, the sound muffled by the rain. The blue and white exterior was riddled and pocked with small arms fire. The interior of the pilot’s compartment was illuminated by a half dozen monitors each displaying several, from my perspective at least, blurry lines of text. I gestured toward several lines of text that blinked red.
“Woes of the city, my friend,” the uniformed man said with a weak smile, helping me into the back of his transport. “You are just one of many calls I get to answer tonight.”
The transport rose quickly into the air, passing effortlessly over the traffic below. The lights of the city streamed into the very narrow slits of the passenger compartment. The interior betrayed something of every moment endured by other folks who had also enjoyed the same accommodations. The seats were marred by people wearing restraints, but the floor seemed conspicuously clean. I asked the uniformed man what he did for a living, still hazy and trying awkwardly to just make conversation.
The uniformed man shook his head, my question only betraying more of my dazed and confused state. “I’m a Port Montaigne Police Officer. What do you do, sir?” he half shouted so I could hear him though the polycarbonate shield separating us.
I couldn’t remember anything. My name, where I came from, what I did for a living, or why I was lying in an alley all beat to hell. My response was weak, mumbling something about jockeying a desk my whole life trying to take care of the kids. I didn’t want a member of Law Enforcement looking at me too closely, in case I was someone who wanted to avoid such attention.
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