The Noise Revealed

by Ian Whates

  Frustrated, he tried again. Thinking that perhaps the first attempt had failed due to his own unsteadiness, he decided to hold the bow with both hands. He would later blame what happened next on tiredness. He knew there was a sharp, rough bit at the very top of the handle - as if the bow had been connected to some sort of frame or bracket in manufacture and snapped off once completed, the residual bump of the connection still sharp. In order to accommodate the second hand, he adjusted his grip without thinking, dragging the tip of his thumb across the sharp edge. The sudden pain almost made him jerk the bow away from the veil, but somehow he had the presence of mind not to, pulling the injured hand away instead. He couldn't believe how sharp that was, it had cut his thumb.

  As his hand jerked away, a drop of blood arced from the injured digit. Kyle watched in frozen fascination as this ruby bead of his own life stuff sailed towards the veil. It struck just behind the blade, which was already partway across the rent.

  He had no idea what to expect. The whole area around the impact pulsed. Had he caused some irreparable harm? The drop of blood hadn't sailed through the veil or splattered against it; instead it seemed to have been absorbed, to become part of the energy. A crimson stripe appeared in the wake of the blade as Kyle continued to draw it across the tear, one that flowed outward until it covered most of the energy being pulled by the bow. Surely that wasn't his blood? After all, colours were shifting and swirling the whole time within these energy curtains, and it had only been a single drop. Yet he couldn't escape the feeling that this was the result of his blood. The blade completed its journey. No tatters this time, no fraying. The tear had sealed.

  Kyle flopped down onto the floor and sat cross-legged, staring at the veil and sucking on his injured thumb. One thing was certain: there'd been nothing about this in the bloody manual! He giggled at his own pun, proof positive that he was overtired.

  As he watched, the veil seemed to pulse, very faintly but constantly, like the pumping of blood through veins, and at one point he fancied he could hear something - a multitude of voices all speaking at once; nothing intelligible, just a distant murmur, soothing as the babbling of a mountain brook.

  He shook himself, realising that he'd been on the verge of falling asleep. Time for bed. No way was he going to finish this now, much as he'd have liked to. As he took his leave, Kyle stopped and gazed back at the veils. Funny, but as he was drifting off to sleep back there, it had almost seemed to him that these curtains of energy were in some way alive.

  Chapter Seventeen

  "This is unlike anything I've ever seen before," Lara said. Her attention was focused on the screen suspended in the air before her, rather than on her visitors - real or virtual. Catherine Chzyski provided the former, while Philip and Malcolm constituted the latter.

  The room was sparsely furnished - a single black upholstered flexiseat currently configured as an upright office chair sat in an apparently random position on the biscuit coloured carpet; a slick chrome drinks dispenser with twin nozzles, one for ice cold water and the other set for scalding black coffee, stood against a wall; a tall spear-leafed plant emerged from a pebble pot sunk into the floor near the far corner, by the window, with a bubbling water feature beside it which blended seamlessly with the pebbles from the plant pot. Other than these there was a single small glass shelf holding an exquisite statuette of a long-legged woman dancing - one knee crooked, toes pointed, every line sensuous - a pair of academic awards which Philip hadn't even realised Lara had earned, and, even more of a surprise, some sort of trophy for martial arts. The most striking feature of the room, though, stood directly opposite the door: a wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor picture window, providing an impressive view of the city's towering skyscrapers and lower rooftops.

  Minimalistic, tasteful, but unmistakably an executive's office; sure sign of how much Kaufman Industries valued Lara's capabilities and of how swiftly her star had risen since Philip embarked on his galactic sightseeing jaunt and relinquished control of KI to Catherine. A silent rebuke to him, albeit unintentional. He probably should have acknowledged Lara's worth long before this, but he'd been so caught up in bringing the project to a successful conclusion that perhaps he'd been guilty of taking others involved for granted.

  Catherine's presence emphasised that this wasn't merely Lara conspiring with them, that she did so with the backing of Kaufman Industries, which he and Malcolm might have had at their beck and call once, but not any more.

  Lara's office boasted plain off-white walls, presumably pattern-free so as not to distract from details on the virtual screens they frequently provided a backdrop for. She stood before the largest stretch of blank wall now and, foregoing the chair, brought another screen into being with deft and precise hand movements - the second screen apparently budding from the primary in response to her gestures, as if it were some tame protozoan.

  Once he and Malcolm had told her about their experiences at the Veils club, Lara had a better idea of what to look for and had set about doggedly studying the coding that underpinned that particular corner of Virtuality. She must have discovered something, or at least so Philip presumed. He very much doubted she'd invited them here for the pleasure of their erudite company. At one level, he was impressed at how quickly Lara had found something once they'd narrowed the search for her. At another, he wondered why someone of her much vaunted expertise hadn't spotted it in the first place.

  Lara spoke with an authority that belied her apparent youth and with a confidence that surprised Philip, despite the years they'd worked together.

  "Deeply encrypted," she went on. "It was a real so-and-so to isolate and identify; strands of code wrapped around other coding, like ivy snaking around a tree. Very clever, very tricky. Worth all the effort, though."

  Philip had the impression that their presence was all but superfluous to Lara, that she would have been poring over the code sequences whether they were there or not - pulling one detail after another onto the secondary screen for closer scrutiny. However, no sooner had that observation crossed his mind than she looked away from the screen for a moment, to regard them sternly, as if to ensure they appreciated the gravity of what she was telling them. Philip was astounded. The Lara he recalled was quietly efficient but would rarely speak unless asked to. She really had blossomed. "It's as if this goes beyond mere code," she said.

  "How do you mean?"

  She shook her head. "I don't want to sound too melodramatic, but it's almost as if this is the coding for existence itself."

  "What?"

  "I don't mean our sort of existence," she said, "but the more I study this the more astounding and complex it becomes... and I'm increasingly convinced that this intricate and..." - she paused, searching for words - "...incredibly detailed system of code is underpinning the very fabric of a universe, of another brane. Some of the subsystems even appear to be self-organising, and that would seem to suggest..."

  "Life," Philip said.

  "Exactly. This is the code for an entire other universe."

  "One in which human space and Byrzaen space converges," Malcolm murmured thoughtfully, "and the distance between becomes an irrelevance."

  That would certainly fit with what they'd encountered at Veils.

  "Right," the girl confirmed, clearly relieved that they were still with her, or at least someone was. "In a sense it's like Home's Virtuality, which anyone on the planet can access and instantly find themselves involved with someone from half the world away. This brane seems to link anywhere in the universe in similar fashion."

  "Or at least our neck of the wood and the Byrzaens'," Philip interjected, feeling that Lara was making too big a conjecture based on what little they knew.

  We mean you no harm. The repeated phrase hidden within the static came back to him. He hadn't mentioned it to anyone. He didn't trust that message, assuming it had been anything more than a product of his own imagining.

  "Okay," he said, "let's assume for a moment that what we found at Veils was
a new universe, one where energy proliferates in sheets, which I'm still not entirely convinced by, how did both races first happen to stumble upon this brane, or invent the math to access it?"

  "Convergent science?" Malcolm suggested.

  "Seems incredibly unlikely."

  "I agree," Lara said. "This is far too intricate. One must have discovered the brane first and then led the other there."

  "So we're no further forward than we were before," Catherine said. "We've still no idea what the touchstone was, what first brought humans and Byrzaens into contact with each other."

  "But does that really matter anymore?" Malcolm wondered.

  "It does if we want to put a stop to this. Or does it? Lara?"

  "Depends on what you mean." Her voice was guarded, suspicious.

  "Could you come up with something that would disrupt this code, subverting its whole structure so that it would never fit together again?"

  She frowned. "You're talking about a pretty nasty virus, something that would affect this permanently at a fundamental level, tearing up the very ground rules it's built upon."

  "Yes."

  She chewed at her bottom lip for a second. "Possibly, but are you certain you really want me to try?"

  "Why wouldn't we?"

  "This is more than just messing around with code, Philip. If I'm right, we're talking about disrupting the very fabric of another universe."

  "Not an issue. As far as we know this universe only exists to accommodate interaction between the Byrzaens and us. If what you're proposing can stop alien interference in human affairs, the collateral damage is more than worth paying."

  "What about the self modifying subsystems I found? What if there really is life in there?"

  We mean you no harm. He deliberately pushed that nagging message to the back of his thoughts. "We don't know that, and we don't know what level of life even if there is any. It could be amoeboid or bacterial. This is something we can debate and even look into once we have the virus. Until then, it doesn't matter."

  Lara held his gaze for a moment, as if she wanted to say more, but then her eyes dropped and she said, "All right. I just want to make sure everyone appreciates what's being proposed here. I've no concept of what else the Byrzaens might tap this brane for or how our tampering with it could affect their capabilities."

  Philip was growing impatient. "Exactly. None of us have any concept, and for all we know there won't be any other affects, so let's proceed on that basis for now, shall we?" He never imagined Lara had such an acutely developed social conscience, particularly not when the society in question wasn't even human. The responsibility of science had been drummed into Philip almost from birth, but he was being responsible; to his own race, his species.

  "Fair enough," she said. He could only hope she meant it.

  Kyle slept well, but not long. He fell asleep thinking about the veils and woke up itching to get back to them. For all he knew his dreams in between probably centred on them as well. Kyle rarely remembered his dreams.

  By the time Emily turned up he'd succeeded in repairing each and every tear. At first he had put the events of the previous evening down to his own tiredness and perhaps one too many beers in the rec room before wandering back here, but, try as he might, he couldn't get the bow to seal the really big tears. No matter how slowly and steadily he moved the blade across the gap the energy frayed before it reached the other side. Only when he (very deliberately this time) pricked his thumb and added a drop of his own blood to the mix did the energy adhere properly to the blade, enabling him to heal the rift.

  Why blood should make such a vital difference, he had no idea, but, once he stopped questioning the logic of the process and merely accepted it, things moved swiftly. Again he felt a connection with the veils, a sense that there was something organic about them rather than pure inanimate energy. It was as if, damaged, they'd needed the introduction of new living material to heal themselves. The noise, too, hovered at the edge of perception, that background hum as of a million whispering voices, just beyond his hearing. It was trying to entice him, he concluded, to lure him into the energy fields and away from the world he knew. He closed his ears, refusing to be tempted, and before long the noise dwindled into insignificance. The great darkness from which the veils emerged - a space clearly not confined within the walls of The Rebellion - had resumed all the brooding menace he remembered from The Noise Within. He very determinedly shut such concerns from his mind, concentrating on the drive units and the veils immediate to them. That way, he could continue with his work.

  In surprisingly short time every shimmering veil stood resplendent and whole again. Although he could spot the swirls of crimson patterning that hadn't been there before, marking where drops of his blood had apparently blossomed and stimulated the energy fields, he doubted anyone else would. Kyle felt elated and pretty damned pleased with himself, despite now having a couple of very tender fingers and thumbs.

  On hearing Emily approach - in conversation with someone, a man's voice - he quickly ran through a series of nonchalant poses, settling on jauntily leaning against the cowling of one of the drive units, the bow held casually in his free hand, one foot cocked over the other, toe to the ground.

  His reward was a greeting that dribbled into stunned silence as she took in the scene: "Hi, Kyle, what are you looking so smug a...?" and a look of complete disbelief.

  Simon, one of the bridge crew who appeared to be a friend of both Emily's and Kethi's, entered the room behind her. He seemed equally impressed. "Well I'll be blowed!"

  "Not by me you won't," Kyle assured him.

  He found it hard not to stare at Simon's crippled hand. On most ULAW worlds you'd have to be destitute and raised in the back of beyond to reach adulthood with a deformity like that, and he couldn't work Simon out. Why hadn't the habitat corrected this?

  Emily clapped her hands and grinned broadly. She followed that up by coming over to slap a kiss on his cheek. He could think of people he'd rather be kissed by, but beggars can't be choosers and adulation was always welcome from whatever quarter.

  "You can tell the captain that in another day or so, her ship's engines will be ready to go," Kyle said. Actually they were probably ready there and then, but he wanted a day's leeway just to be certain his repairs didn't fall apart again.

  "You can tell her yourself," Emily replied. "After all, you're the senior engineer around here."

  He made the call. Kethi was on the bridge. His news brought her straight down to the engine room. She stared intently at the veils, as if looking to see the seam or perhaps discover a trick. Then she turned to Kyle.

  "Congratulations," she said. "This is impressive. Do you mind me asking how you did it?"

  Kyle shrugged. "Well, for the larger tears, I used the bow."

  Kethi laughed. "You mean to say you actually got that thing to work?"

  "Yes, I mean the manual says..."

  "Oh, I know what the manual says," Kethi assured him. "I know what the bow's supposed to do, but I don't know of anyone who's actually managed to get it to work as advertised. Do you, Emily?"

  "No," Emily replied cheerfully. "Tried hard enough during school training sessions, but the veils just tattered, no one could ever make the stupid things stick."

  Kethi gazed at him as if seeing him in a new light. "It seems Jim was right. You really are a miracle worker."

  "Just doing my job," Kyle assured her, though his chest puffed up a little when he said it. He didn't mention the blood, didn't see the need to. After all, miracle workers should never reveal the tricks of their trade.

  Word of the engine's repair soon spread around the ship, and Kyle's popularity soared accordingly. By the time Simon regaled a small group in the rec room with the tale of how he and Emily had entered the engine room to find Kyle leaning against the drive cowling, job done, Kyle had already heard it a half dozen times. He probably ought to have grown bored with it by then, but the truth was he hadn't. Particularly as J
oss was sitting directly opposite him.

  Being praised so enthusiastically by somebody else without any encouragement on his part could only be a good thing.

  "Well," he said as Simon finished the anecdote, "I just did what I could. I mean, I can't help being a genius." He grinned, to show that he was at least partway joking.

  Joss had been staring fixedly at her drink as Simon spoke. She now looked up, her gaze briefly meeting Kyle's, just long enough for him to see the hurt in her eyes.

  "Yes, we're all so damned lucky you joined us, aren't we?"

  With that, she pushed her chair back, stood up and stormed out the room.

  Kyle stared at her retreating back. "What... what did I say?"

  "It's not you, Kyle," Simon assured him. "It's Wicksy."

  "Who the hell's Wicksy?"

  "He was her closest friend, more than a friend. Part of the engineering crew; he was one of those we lost in the attack."

  "Oh." All of Kyle's euphoria evaporated. No wonder Joss had been so ambivalent towards him since he arrived. "I... I didn't know."