Contents
Front Matter
Insert
Quote: The Lost World
Dedication
Author's Note
Enter the Shroud
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
About the Author
By the same Author
Enter the Shroud
by Bran Nicholls
Published by Aarluuk Press
Copyright © Bran Nicholls 2018
Illustration © Tom Edwards
TomEdwardsDesign.com
Bran Nicholls has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events or organisations is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
“So tomorrow we disappear into the unknown. This account I am transmitting down the river by canoe, and it may be our last word to those who are interested in our fate.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) , The Lost World
for Stu and Rich
- childhood memories
and the final frontier
Author’s Note
Enter the Shroud is a short story, an extended prologue, and book zero in the Shroud Discord series. It is also a little weird in places, but a lot of fun to write.
Bran
May 2018
Enter the Shroud
BRAN NICHOLLS
PART 1
The man was a liar. No-one can pass through a pheromone door without the owner as a key, and in this case, that was me. I pushed my wrinkled palm against the smoothplast door and let the momentum slide it open. From the door to my apartment I could see the kitchen area and the man, about fifty, legs crossed, and reading my book.
“I’m only pretending to read, Joe,” he said. “Come in.”
“This is my apartment.”
“The door was open.”
“No it wasn’t.”
“And yet, here I am.” He put the book down on the table as I closed the door and walked into the kitchen.
“Off,” I said, as the sensors in the walls triggered holographic birds out of the tree-trunk veneer I had paid extra to have installed. The birds, wrens, I think, burst in soft showers of electron feathers. I sat down in the chair opposite the man, picked up the book and smoothed the pages, before closing it on the surface of the table.
“That’s quite an extravagance.”
“I know.”
“How many do you have?”
“Three,” I said, “on record.”
“Ah.” The man smiled as he smoothed his thumb in circular motions across his finger. “You have an unregistered book?”
“Is that why you are here?”
“It could easily be,” he said, “if you only had one unregistered book.” The rasp of skin stopped when he pressed his fingernail into the tip of his thumb. “But you have one more, don’t you? Or did you think that dictionaries don’t count?”
Lying clearly wasn’t the only augment the man possessed, purchased even. The twenty years between us confirmed that, unless he was born in one of the colonies, he was most likely commissioned. His parents must have been in business, few other branches of society required the kind of augments he had. Unless, of course, he was a spy.
“Tell me about the dictionary, Joe,” he said. “It is Joe, isn’t it? Joe A5YLUM?”
“That’s right.”
“Fifth wave of asylum seekers.” He smoothed his fingers back and forth across the lip of the table. He was in perpetual motion. Why?
“Yes.”
“Out of Jamaica? About the time of the second flood?”
“That’s right.” I pulled the book into my lap, held it tight in my gnarled fingers. “You wanted to know about the dictionary?”
“You actually read it?” The man raised an eyebrow.
“Yes.”
“It’s not a crime to read, despite what they might say on the infochannel.” He picked up the remote from the table, and said, “Do you mind if I turn it on?”
“No,” I said, and then, “What is?”
“What?”
“What is a crime? Why are you here? Why did you break into my apartment?” What I really wanted to know was how he had broken in. I paid a fortune for the door, and now I felt robbed – robbed of my security, and now my secrets.
The infochannel sensor performed a quick vapour scan of the room, identified two males, and selected the appropriate voice and pitch. The newscaster’s voice – pitched somewhere between genders, leaning towards the voice of a mildly aroused arrogant male, presented the news at a faster tempo than I was used to. I found that curious, that the sensor would recognise the stranger as the more dominant of the two of us. Even the artificial intelligence recognised who had the stronger hand of cards.
“I don’t know your name,” I said, as the infochannel presented the news from the citysphere, and titbits from the colonies, enough to satisfy the Martian quarter in their dust-drenched diamond ghetto located in the southern part of the sphere.
“LeRoy H4RBINGER,” he said, and held out his hand. It was soft to the touch, his skin cool. More augments. “H4RBINGER means lodger,” he said.
Another lie.
“No it doesn’t.”
“No?”
“It’s Old French,” I said. “Herbergere – one who provides lodging. You are from the fourth generation of realtors. You own…”
“Let me stop you there,” LeRoy said, with a wave of his cool-skinned palm, “before you get ahead of yourself.”
“You don’t provide lodging?”
“I’m not a realtor, no.”
A pity. If his family owned the building, I might have found an explanation as to how he got past my expensive door. I studied those cool palms, the refined jaw, the slick-back dark hair, and the clothes – few men could wear the Strident collection and get away with it. Even fewer could afford to.
“I’m an augment consultant…”
“I did not request a meeting.” I could feel my brow furrowing as I considered who might have purchased the services of an augment consultant for a seventy-three-year-old black immigrant? It wasn’t my employer. The Library of the Sphere barely had enough credits to pay their curators, let alone invest in them. I was stumped, and the man knew it. The corners of his mouth twitched, and he pulled a disc from his pocket.
LeRoy pressed the disc between his finger and thumb. When it began to vibrate he released it. I watched as it hovered in a low orbit above our heads, shimmering as it twitched with each revolution.
“Is that an inhibitor disc?”
“Yes,” LeRoy said. “Now we can talk freely.”
“About why you broke into my apartment?”
“That, and other things,” he said.
> The disc tilted to an angle of forty-five degrees, its leading edge cutting through the air above our heads at a steady speed and shimmer. Inhibitor discs, like the man’s suit, were not cheap. I felt sweat on my palms and wiped them on the thin blue-stain library tunic covering my thighs.
“I represent TK Inc.,” LeRoy said, and, just for a moment, his hands were still. His whole body, in fact. It was a tell, and if I had been a card player I might have thought it was important.
“Who are they?”
“More of a what, actually,” he said, as he resumed his soft caress of the edge of the table. “TK Inc. is better known as The Knowledge.”
I had heard of them, the first and only company to successfully privatise data, taking the information that pre-sphere citizens shared willingly, and turning it into a commodity, that even the original providers of the content could no longer afford. Personal preferences had to be purchased to be claimed, something my grandparents struggled with when they, like many other asylum seekers, moved to the closest citysphere. The price of entry was information; the actual cost was a lot higher.
“TK Inc. has a problem,” LeRoy said. “You might have heard about it?”
“No.”
“I would have thought a curator would have a passion for information.”
“I’m passionate about books.”
“And words.” LeRoy’s body was still again, but for the light flickering in his eyes. “It’s no accident that you knew the origins of the word herbergere.”
“Was that a test?”
“Yes.”
“And I passed? Why? Because I know etymology?”
“You passed because you can read, Joe.”
LeRoy clicked his fingers twice and the disc above our heads started to spin faster. The words of the infochannel began to blur, and I felt drawn into a bubble of intimacy, and I admit that I was intrigued.
“Everybody can read,” I said.
“Sporing is not reading,” LeRoy said. “The sphere-wide literacy act made sporing one of the few mandatory augments. If a couple wants to commission a baby, they have to pay for sporing. But the peripheral assimilation of symbols and images is not reading, Joe, and TK Inc. needs somebody who can read.” LeRoy paused to smile. “They need Joe A5YLUM.”
I didn’t understand, and I said so. Why would a powerful corporation need an old man?
“Surely there are reading augments?”
“They are CTA – Class Twelve Archaic.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Say you commission a baby, and you have money – obviously,” LeRoy said, and we both knew babies were a luxury of the rich, and the poor were either bred out or shipped out of the spheres. “Now, if you want your baby to have a career in sports, you can buy athletic augments. You know this, of course.”
“Yes,” I said.
LeRoy started counting on his fingers. “You’ve got artistic augments, math augments, science, whatever you want. The rich can upgrade their children to suit whatever field they want. They can do whatever they want.”
“But not read?”
“Why should they? There is no need. You must be one of the few people in the sphere to actually own a book. Hell, Joe, you’ve got more books on actual display than the library.”
“And that isn’t was this is about?”
LeRoy laughed. “I don’t want your books, Joe, and I don’t want your dictionary either.” He leaned over the table and said, “I want you, Joe. TK needs you. We want you to work for us.”
“Because I don’t need augments to read?”
“Exactly,” LeRoy said. The chair creaked as he leaned back. “Now, I’ll admit that TK has some problems. They need new collateral to maintain their powerbase, and to keep a firm grip on those government types. You must have heard about them? Self-styled politicians supposedly fed-up with companies ruling the spheres. Well, it’s not gonna fly, Joe, the corps won’t ever let that happen. But TK is losing influence, it needs a new influx of collateral, and, since people are more or less content to be passive these days, there’s no money in minds anymore. TK needs to look elsewhere.”
I looked up at the disc. The shimmer emanating from its edges had formed a shell that glittered above our heads. I understood little of the technology crammed into the disc. I understood even less of what LeRoy was telling me. He knew, the minute I looked at him.
“It’s because of the archaic classification,” he said. “After the creation of the spheres, the companies and corporations classified reading as archaic to limit competitors from reinventing something that already existed. The population of the planet was on its knees, Joe, the last thing anyone wanted was to look back. We wanted to learn from the past, not relive it. Looking forward, Joe, that was the key. Books, and the knowledge they contained were not banned, but access was restricted. It’s all accessible, of course, but we spor, we don’t read. There’s nothing left to interpret. No harm to be done.”
“But you need someone who can read without the use of augments?”
“Yes.”
“There can’t be many of us left?”
“There aren’t. In fact,” LeRoy said, “there’s just the one.”
“Me.”
The shimmering shell above us crackled in the silence. I glanced at my book on the table, a slim leather-bound glossary of words and meanings. The book was older than I was. I picked it up, and said, “You want me to read books?”
“TK Inc. wants you to read books, yes.”
“But I thought they were restricted?”
“Restricted, burned, lost. You’re quite right.”
“Then what books am I to read?”
LeRoy paused again, throwing weight into his tell. “Not what, Joe, but where.”
Again, I failed to understand.
“Before I tell you anything more, I need some assurances.”
“What kind?”
“The binding kind.”
“I’m an old man, LeRoy, whatever you bind me to, will last for a few years at best.”
“Because of your health?”
“Because I’m dying.”
LeRoy worked on the surface of the table, smoothing away invisible mites and molecules with his hands as he worked up to his pitch, the offer. I decided it must have something to do with the smoothplast case beside his chair. I hadn’t noticed it before, but the way he looked at it now suggested to me that it might be important.
“Old age?” he said. “I can fix that.”
“How?”
LeRoy nodded at the case. “Augments.” He laughed at my furrowed brow, and said, “Non-restricted, Joe. If you agree to working for us, then you will need certain augments to enable you to do your job.”
“What kind?”
“Wait,” he said, and held up his hand. “Assurances,” he said. “I need some.” LeRoy fished another disc from his pocket. This one was fatter than the inhibitor disc spinning above us. He placed it on the table, and said, “You know what this is? No? It’s a debt disc, as in you are indebted to me the second you agree to the terms.”
I looked at it. It seemed to glow.
“Some people call it a death disc.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “You break the contract, you die. It’s quite simple, really.”
I looked at the disc, and the other one above us, the case on the floor was probably full of even more gadgets. This man, this H4RBINGER was certainly connected. Someone was providing him with a lot of technology for this one job. For this one Joe, I thought, and smiled.
“Come on,” LeRoy said. “Think about it, one last adventure before the end.”
“One last adventure? What do you know of my life?”
LeRoy pressed his thumb into the centre of the debt disc as he spoke. “I know you have worked as a curator from the age of fourteen, reading the spines of books, never allowed to open them.” He reached out and took one of my hands, splaying my fingers. “How many times have you run your f
ingers across the letters, felt the indentations, wondered at the contents, before sealing the books inside a glass case, and pressing the recall and file buttons on the console, watching as the robot arm takes the book from your hand never to be seen again. I’m giving you a chance, Joe, a chance to open a book. So,” he said, and let go of my hand, “what do you say?”
I looked at the disc, and said, “I just place my palm on it?”
“And the adventure begins. That’s right.”
He had a point, the liar in the Strident suit. I did want to open the spines, to smell the print, to run my fingers beneath the words, to imagine, to live, to breathe, and to read.
I put the glossary down on the table, and pressed my palm onto the disc.
PART 2
I didn’t feel the pain for at least three seconds after I bumped the disc with the palm of my hand, and then, like sliver worms, I saw the poison spread beneath the skin of my palm until it was gone, and I was in LeRoy’s debt. I massaged my hand while LeRoy lifted the slim case and set it on the table to one side. He stood up, talking as he lifted various objects out of the case and placed them in front of me.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” he said, lifting his hand for silence once again, as he reached up to tap the inhibitor disc out of a slow stupor. It started to spin faster and the shimmer shell glittered. “But it’s important that you take note.”
“You mean take notes?”
“No, nothing must be recorded; I just mean I want you to be aware of each phase of the augmentation.”
“Phases?”
“Necessary, I’m afraid, for a man of your condition.”
“You mean my age.”
“No, I mean your condition. If you had been properly augmented, even as an adult, you could have avoided these steps.” He put the last of three containers on the table. “But then I wouldn’t have my reader, would I?”
“I suppose not.” I picked up a cylinder, turned it in the light, and lifted it as if to shake it.
Enter the Shroud: In the Pursuit of Knowledge (The Shroud Discord Book 0) Page 1
