Enter the Shroud: In the Pursuit of Knowledge (The Shroud Discord Book 0)

by Bran Nicholls

  “Don’t,” LeRoy said, and helped me put the cylinder on the table. “Very expensive.”

  “What is?”

  “The first phase of your treatment.” LeRoy sat down and arranged the three canisters in a line between us. “Phase one,” he said, “is all about your skin. For a non-augment of your age you are in unbelievably good shape.” He pinched a flap of skin from the back of my hand, counting silently as it sank and spread flat over my veins. “Do you hydrate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not enough. We’ll have to amend that. But that’s the easy part. Phase one focuses on the skin because phase two is all about muscle.” He nodded as I mouthed the word muscle. “That’s right; I’m going to give you muscles, Joe, and the memory to use them.”

  “What kind of augments require muscle-memory?”

  “Combat, callisthenics, and craftiness. I’m going to turn you into a lithe, stealth fighter, Joe. You’re going to love it.” LeRoy tapped the larger canister in the centre.

  “Why?”

  “Why are you going to love it?”

  “No. Why a soldier?”

  The muscles in LeRoy’s face twitched into what I imagined was his most sympathetic arrangement of creases. He wore his suit better.

  “You need to be able to take care of yourself,” he said. “I’m giving you the means to do so.”

  “That’s phase two? Combat augments?”

  “Yes.”

  “Phase three?” I asked, and nodded at the flat oblong with rounded edges at the end of the line.

  “That’s Synthea. We’ll come back to her when we’re ready.” LeRoy spun the case on the table so that his hand was hidden by the lid. He reached inside, glanced at the shimmer shell above us, and then nodded at me. “When you’re ready, I need you to stand up.”

  “Here? In the kitchen?”

  “The kitchen is fine.”

  LeRoy waited as I pushed back my chair. He pulled the gun out of the case and pointed it at me as soon as I was standing.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s better this way,” he said, and stunned me with a blast of energy at my sternum.

  Being shot didn’t hurt as much as the floor when I hit it. The back of my head connected with the smoothplast tiles, but I couldn’t move anything, couldn’t check if I was bleeding. Only my body was stunned. There was nothing wrong with my senses, and I could hear LeRoy cursing as he dragged the table to the counter in the kitchen, and then dragged me beneath the shimmer shell. I moved my lips and discovered I could speak.

  “You shot me.”

  “I stunned you, Joe. It’s better this way.”

  “What is?” I felt LeRoy tug at my boots, my socks, and then he untied the draw cord in the waistband of my trousers. “What are you doing?”

  “It’s my own fault,” he said. “I should have had you strip before I stunned you.”

  I moved my eyes to peer down my chest as LeRoy took off his Strident jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. He pressed his tie flat against his shirt and it stayed there as he removed my underpants.

  “I don’t like this, LeRoy.”

  “I know. But really,” he said, and lifted his head to smile at me, “it’s not what it seems. Other people, well,” he said, as he started to unbutton my shirt, “they might take advantage of a situation like this. Of course, they would be violating the Sex Act, paragraph thirteen, concerning physical non-procreational activity, and,” LeRoy pointed at the shimmer shell, “even with one of these, there would be sufficient evidence, smells, fluids, you name it, that they would face conviction.” LeRoy paused to tug my arms out of my sleeves, rolling me from one side to the other.

  “This isn’t about sex?”

  “You sound disappointed.”

  I discovered that I was. At least, once the shock of being stunned and stripped by a stranger had passed. Yes, I was disappointed. Sex was reserved and preserved for the rich and the colonies. I belonged to neither.

  “Well, anyway, we’re almost there.”

  LeRoy pressed my arms against my sides, straightened my fingers so that they were flush along my hips. He pressed my ankles together, and then reached for the cylinder on the table.

  “So this is going to feel a lot worse than it actually is.” He unscrewed the cylinder, waited a second, his fingers poised like a beak, and then thrust his hand inside. When he pulled it out again, I saw something wriggling between his fingers. He pinched the creature at the base of the neck, and I watched as the head grew as the jaws opened. “A cartilage eel,” LeRoy said, as he turned the eel in the light.

  “I didn’t want to ask, but I did. “What does it do?”

  “This little fella is going to consume you, Joe. Like a python. Have you heard about pythons?”

  “Yes,” I said, my eyes locked on the eel as its jaws extended. The head was as big as the body was long now, and I got the impression – python-like – that it wasn’t finished. “You said this was for my skin?”

  “To make it more elastic, yes.” LeRoy knelt down by my feet.

  “You couldn’t inject something into my skin? Like with a needle?” I thought really hard about moving my feet, but nothing happened. My muscles were disabled, but the nerves and sensory receptors in my skin were getting a chemical workout as my synapses fired at the first touch of the inside of the eel’s mouth, as LeRoy worked its jaws over my toes.

  “That would be a temporary measure, Joe. What the eel does for your skin will be permanent. Until you die.”

  “Am I going to die?”

  “Not from the eel.”

  I peered over my chest and watched as LeRoy let go and the eel worked its lower jaw beneath my heels. It went a lot faster then, the eel growing and expanding as it wormed its way up my shins, over my knees, and then, I realised, it was going to consume my penis, it was going to swallow me whole.

  LeRoy laughed as he caught the focus of my gaze. “If you know how to retract, this would be the time,” he said.

  “Retract? You can’t retract a penis.”

  “I suppose not.”

  LeRoy pulled up a chair and sat down as the eel twisted to consume my hands and lower abdomen. It was almost as long as I was tall, and I realised that was the intention. Python-like it stretched and grew until I could feel the clammy wet rasp of cold reptilian innards pulsing over my skin. If it had been warm it might even have been pleasurable. I settled on the words slick, moist and repulsive. LeRoy picked up my glossary of ancient words.

  “How will I breathe?” I asked, as the eel consumed my shoulders.

  LeRoy put the book down and reached inside the case. He pulled out and extended what looked like a clamp with a rubber net stretched beneath the apex. “This goes on the top of your head,” he said, and demonstrated by placing the clamp on his head. It looked like the A-frame from a historical building. “You’ll have to hold your breath for a moment, while I push it into place, and then I press this button, here at the top.” Two pairs of hollow metal teeth flicked out from both sides of the clamp. They were the width and length of my fingers. “Air comes in through the tubes,” LeRoy said. “I’ve heard it’s like wearing a mask, that’s all.”

  “And the eel dies?” I asked, as it slid up my neck.

  “It dies and then your skin absorbs the body.”

  “I’m going to absorb an eel?”

  “It does wonders,” LeRoy said. He tugged the clamp off his head, pressed the teeth against the sides of the apex until they clicked, and then pressed it onto my head, holding it in place as the eel closed its mouth over my nose. “Hold your breath, Joe.”

  Wombs must be like this, I thought, but more spacious. The teeth clicked and a shudder, a death wriggle, tremored through the body of the eel, and then it was still. Still, dark, and wet. It smelled of eggs rotting, stronger by the second. I felt the eel’s skin begin to shrink around my own, and the strange sensation of my pores opening, widening, and filling. Only an hour or so earlier, a strange man had
defeated my apartment’s security system, enticed me into a death debt, shot me in the chest, and fed me to an eel. As days in the citysphere go, this had to be a first for a librarian.

  “How long?” My voice, muffled by the contracting throat of the eel, sounded lost, like I was.

  “The shrinking stops once the eel is dead.”

  I heard the distant scrape of the chair legs across the floor.

  “Then another hour or so,” LeRoy said. “Mind if I read your dictionary?”

  “You can read?”

  “Of course not. You think I would put you through this if I could?”

  “I guess not.”

  I felt LeRoy leave the kitchen. I don’t remember hearing him return. My mind occupied the time between the eel’s death and my skin’s renewal with a rundown of what little I knew about my situation. I had been chosen because I possessed a skill that required no augmentation, and yet I was being augmented to boost my body with other skills, muscle, and elasticity to protect myself while carrying out the mission for which I was selected: reading.

  What on Earth did they want me to read?

  It was then, in the belly of an eel, that I realised my task was not necessarily on Earth. I was being augmented to go off-world, in search of knowledge.

  “They must know where they are sending me,” I said, surprising myself with the sound of my voice, the words wet and slick in my ears.

  “Of course we do,” LeRoy said. “We’re sending you to the Shroud.”

  The Shroud.

  If he had said that from the beginning I would have slapped my palm on the death disc and stunned myself with a blast to the chest, willing the eel to eat me just so that we could get on with the mission. Curators and librarians swore in the name of the Shroud in the corridors of the Library of the Sphere, revered it as legend, a hidden society, secretive, shrouded by name and nature, the lost world of the savant. And, if they were sending me there, that meant they had found it.

  The shimmer shell no longer seemed out of place.

  But the eel; the eel stank.

  PART 3

  The eel’s skin dried as it died, until the surface of my body was coated with the husk of the living, like salt diamonds on a dry lake. My skin began to itch, but I couldn’t scratch, although I could feel the tingles of life at my extremities. I could also see through the eel’s jaw as the skin thinned as it crusted on mine. I flicked my gaze around the kitchen until I found LeRoy thumbing through my prized dictionary, my contraband.

  I was thirty-two when I bought it, from the sewer mall, when the shops and the poor were forced underground. The sewer water was gone, but the stench remained, ingrained in the flaked and cracked pipes, the joints in the walls, and twisted into the roots pressing down from the plants and trees on the surface. I didn’t open it for seven years. And now LeRoy was thumbing through it like it was a magazine in a waiting room, not a historical artefact, a treasure hoard of words.

  He wasn’t even wearing gloves.

  “Another twenty minutes,” LeRoy said.

  “And then what?”

  “You’ll feel great. I promise you.”

  “You’ve never tried it.”

  “Customer testimonials,” he said. “Tune to the right infochannel and you can hear them.”

  The eel skin prickled in a thin layer over my nose. It cracked when I flared my nostrils, the first part of my body to regain movement.

  “Tell me about your work,” I said.

  LeRoy reached over to the table and dropped the dictionary onto the surface, and said, “What do you want to know?”

  “What does an augment consultant do for TK Inc.?”

  “Besides feeding old men to eels?”

  “Yes, besides that.”

  “I have been contracted to TK Inc. for the duration of this particular project.”

  Even through the film of eel skin, I noticed that pause, a stillness, LeRoy’s tell. He stood up and flicked at the disc as it slowed above us. He picked up the second container from the table as he sat down, opening it on his lap as he talked.

  “I can’t tell you too much about it, even with the assurances you have given me, but I can say that TK Inc. needs to replenish its stock of information. Members of the board believe that the Shroud will provide a new source of information to stabilise the company’s internal haemorrhaging, to build a foundation for the future.”

  “But the Shroud,” I said. “It’s legendary, no-one knows if it really exists.”

  “You’re not wrong, Joe, but you don’t possess all the facts. Few people do,” LeRoy said, with a glance at the shimmer shell. “The nature of the Shroud – shrouded as it were, an entire star system cloaked, hidden – has preserved that legendary status. But a splinter has been detected. We have found a way in.”

  “We? You mean TK Inc.?”

  “Yes.”

  LeRoy hesitated, but I noticed, just as I noticed I could wriggle my toes, lift my fingers away from my legs. The remains of the eel crackled and dried in flakes across my body. Soon, I realised, I would be able to sit up.

  “But we have to get there first, and quietly. The Shroud is full of secrets, unparalleled knowledge, the likes of which we can only dream about. Possession of that knowledge, the assimilation of it, well… Just think about it, Joe. Whoever owns that new knowledge will be able to establish a new base of power. Just patenting new products alone will secure the company’s financial future.”

  “So it’s about money? More riches for the elite?”

  LeRoy frowned. His fingers twitched at the sides of the container in his lap. “I don’t see you living in the sewer, Joe.”

  “But I’m not rich,” I said, as I moved my arms and, slowly, propped myself up on my elbows. “I’m just employable. Useful until I’m not.”

  “You are useful, and if we forget about socioeconomics for a moment, and not worry about the future of the world, think about the Shroud. You’ll be the first person to enter it. Ever. A true explorer. Now that’s something to get excited about.”

  “But you’re sending me in as a thief, aren’t you?”

  “The Shroud society is dying. Why else would there be a crack in their shield?”

  “So I’m to exploit a dying society, plunder from the husks?”

  “I said it was dying, I don’t believe it is dead. But yes, we want you to plunder, but not just anything. I could have sent two spears of shock troops on a snatch and grab mission, plundering the Shroud’s libraries, ransacking the archives, but they would just as likely bring back recipe books for Shroud cuisine than plans for deep space reactor cores. Words mean nothing to them.”

  I sat up. The film of eel skin smeared into my fingers as I brushed at my arms and legs, tugged the dead jaws of eel from around my head and neck. LeRoy was right; I did feel rejuvenated, as if my skin was charged. Where the pigment in my skin had freckled with age I now looked upon a deep smooth glow, the suppleness of youth. I was reborn Jamaican. But, as I stood up, the skin sagged around my geriatric muscles; it hung from my ribs, pulled at my shoulders. I was wearing a skin suit for a younger, fitter and wealthier frame. In short, there was no meat on my bones, not enough for the librarian’s new clothes.

  “I can fix that,” LeRoy said.

  “Phase two,” I said, as I turned the eel jaw in my hands before tossing it onto the floor.

  “Exactly.”

  LeRoy pulled a large bore metal syringe from the container on his lap. He screwed a needle the length and diameter of my middle finger onto the syringe, placed the container on the table and stood up. He took a handfull of blood-red lozenges from the container and opened his palm to show me them.

  “You’re going to inject me with them?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked at the needle, noted the large bore, and said, “You’ve run out of eels?”

  “Funny,” LeRoy said. “Only a few hours ago you were asking about an injection.” He lifted the syringe in his hand. “Here it is.”
r />   “It’s huge.”

  “It is.”

  “You’re going to stun me again, aren’t you?”

  “Unfortunately not. Your muscles need to be active for the lozenges to be absorbed. I’m going to have to inject your arms, your legs, back and stomach. I also need to inject a lozenge into your heart,” he said, and tapped the largest of the lozenges with his the nail of his thumb. “We tried using a staple gun, to speed the process, but the lozenges imploded under the force, and the effect spread into the fatty tissue instead.” LeRoy laughed. “Imagine a goat carrying the weight of a cow.”

  “A goat?”

  “They stopped experimenting on pigs a long time ago.” LeRoy gestured at the chair. “It’s best if you sit.”

  I wasn’t so sure, but I walked to the chair. My skin rippled as if I was walking through water. When I sat down LeRoy put the syringe and lozenges on the table as he tugged electrowraps from the case and tied me to the chair.

  “These are loose,” I said, as I lifted my wrists within the wraps.

  “They have to be,” LeRoy said. “If they weren’t you’d severe an artery once you start bulking up.” He took a thick rod of wood from the case and held it in front of my face. “Teak,” he said. “You might want to bite down on it.”

  I nodded.

  LeRoy pressed the wood into my mouth. I could feel the indentations of bites and incisors with my tongue.

  “We’ll save the heart for last. The wraps will be tight by then.” LeRoy picked up the syringe, unscrewed the plunger and loaded the first lozenge. “Ready?”

  I wasn’t, but the image of me folding my skin into bands and holding them around my waist as I wandered the corridors of the library appealed less than the thought of the pain LeRoy was about to provoke with the needle. Of course, that was before he stabbed me in my thigh and squeezed the augment plug into my muscle. I confess that I screamed. The teak rod rolled out of my mouth and tumbled into my naked lap.

  “Just a second more.”

  The shimmer shell rippled as it compensated to absorb the last of my scream, and then LeRoy was finished, the needle withdrawn. Blood spattered across my thigh, and LeRoy slapped a bandage over the entry wound. The pain of the needle was replaced with fire as the lozenge worried into the fibres of my old muscle, expanding and stretching. The skin around my thigh swelled around the muscle, and I watched the wave of new Jamaican eel-flesh ripple the length of my left leg as the lozenge spread through the fibres of one group of muscles and into the next.