Altered Reality
Page 1
Eliza Green brings excitement and a true feeling of urgency to the flurry of activity from all directions in her well-written tale.
Top 500 Amazon Reviewer
Green has done a lovely job of creating a new species of beings that are likeable and intriguing. The indigenes are fascinating creatures that I quickly became invested in.
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ALTERED REALITY
The Exilon 5 Series, Book 2
By
Eliza Green
Copyright © 2013 Eliza Green
Smashwords Edition
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All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Content Editor and Proofreader: Averill Buchanan
Cover Design: Design for Writers
This book is also available in print
www.elizagreenbooks.com
Chapter 1
Earth
Bill Taggart’s hands shook as he held his wife’s coded letters. He ran a finger across his name on one of the cream envelopes, trying to recall everything he could about his wife’s handwriting. Were these written under duress? The ‘T’ in Taggart had its usual curlicue at the end of the horizontal line. He’d always loved her handwriting, so feminine, almost like calligraphy.
As he turned the envelopes over in his hands, he wondered what she had needed to tell him that she couldn’t have said to his face. He’d been thinking about this for days now. Isla hadn’t been herself for months before her disappearance, just over two years ago. Perhaps the coded letters contained an explanation; so why was it so difficult for him to read them?
Having the letters in his possession made him feel guilty. He had known she wasn’t herself so why hadn’t he pushed her to tell him what was wrong at the time? He hadn’t needed marriage vows to prompt him to do all he could to protect her. Thinking about his selfishness made him sick to his stomach. He groped for his mug of coffee and took three large gulps before he was able to breathe normally, calmly.
Inside the private Nottingham apartment he and Isla had once shared, he leaned into one of the fabric-covered long-backed chairs. He recalled following Isla all over town so that she could get the right shade of cream to match the synthetic alpaca wool rug in the living room. He thought about the ways he could have helped her when she needed it most. But, similar to his experience of shopping for fabric, Isla had only ever asked for help when she really needed it.
He sat alone in his apartment, the same one he hadn’t set foot in since he was sent to Exilon 5 to head up the investigation into the Indigenes. His fears of living in it without Isla were still present, but not as debilitating as he had imagined them to be. On his return from Exilon 5, Charles Deighton, CEO of the World Government, had ordered him to go to Washington D.C. and work out of the International Task Office there, but he was grateful for the chance to return to the United Kingdom two weeks later when Deighton lost interest in monitoring him.
Upon his return, he had yet to check in with Simon Shaw at the London-based ITF office and Shaw had not been too eager to put him back on the roster. His gut told him to be more vigilant than ever.
He stood up from the kitchen table, careful not to knock over the stacks of boxes of Isla’s things, things he had packed away in a moment of sadness and self-pity but couldn’t bring himself to throw away. Instead, he had rearranged the boxes four high and two wide against the blind-covered windows to block any external view into the apartment. One day, he hoped to have a reason to unpack them. The coded letters gave him hope. He grabbed the burgundy blanket that was draped over the back of the sofa and pinned it over the Light Box using a couple of nails he’d found in the table drawer by the front door and a shoe as a hammer.
Bill cleared the glass tabletop of things, carefully setting two burgundy placemats, a white milk jug and a matching sugar bowl beside the sink. Isla had bought the placemats at a local junk shop, and had found the jug and bowl at the back of a replication terminal, ready for the trash. Eating at the table had been something they did together and he couldn’t bring himself to throw these trivial knick-knacks out.
With the table clear, he sat down again. He ran his fingers through his hair as he checked the height of the boxes by the window and the blanket haphazardly pinned to the wall that barely covered the Light Box’s virtual facade.
He caught a glimpse of some of Isla’s clothes peeking out of the box and a rush of guilt hit his heart. With his right fist, he kneaded away the pain in his chest. He no longer cared for the things that she had loved: the pot pourri bowl by the front door, normally stuffed with dried lavender and patchouli flowers and strange white flowers, remained empty; the music function on the Light Box was inactive – the last selection was Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, her favourite. After her disappearance, he had slipped back into the isolated existence of a single man with alarming ease. He wondered if reading her letters would change things. The faint smell of perfume on the envelopes was almost gone but the fact that they had a scent at all gave him a renewed sense of purpose.
With increasing agitation, he gripped the edge of the table and sat upright, bracing himself. Brow furrowed, he placed the three envelopes on the glass surface, lining the edges up neatly against each other. He checked the height of the stacked boxes again to reassure himself that he had complete privacy.
He didn’t know in which order he ought to open the envelopes and hoped that their contents would explain things better. He pulled his DPad from his bag and placed it on the table in the lower right hand corner. Laura O’Halloran, the woman who had given him the letters, had explained the code as best as she could. Bill had decided it was best to download several articles on secret languages and codes from the Nottingham Central Digital Library. Until he opened them and read the letters for himself, he would have no idea how to unlock the code.
He ran his finger under the already opened flap of one of the envelopes, noticing how the glue was thicker in certain sections. Laura had received them, already opened, from the woman from booth sixteen, but the glue indicated they had been sealed by an additional person. Who else? he wondered. Possibly someone from the Earth Security Centre or the World Government. The thought that someone else showed an interest in his wife’s letters sent a shiver through him. He was glad they were coded.
Bill pulled two letters out of each of the two envelopes and a fifth letter out of the last envelope. He laid each one flat on the table. He pressed his palms on the glass tabletop and drummed his fingers rhythmically on the surface. After a few minutes, agitated tapping replaced the even drumming. He noticed the fifth, solitary letter was not coded. Reading the top line quickly, he caught his breath and folded it up, shoving it into the back pocket of his trousers.
The four remaining letters had a number written in the top right hand corner, presumably indicating the order in which they had been written, and contained several lines of incomprehensible text. The first letter read:
Dhtei teiao osonm dorta etire estch cehae ihaed veust
Rrone osugi bvake eebia mcipc eooeo mnnad ruati ertsn
hpytfa awieoe imodui sernbo wurteu ichuya sasloe tticlr hitole
Bill pulled his DPad closer and opened the files about codes that he had downloaded earlier. He worked through the files sequentially, trying to figure out which code Isla had used. The only topic that was vaguely familiar was Morse code, something Isla had once mentioned a long time ago and which had sparked her interest in developing a secret language. His only wish now was that she had shared more of her ideas with him. She’d always been too tired after her shifts as a military trainer, or when he spoke to her via the Light Box while she was stationed on Exilon 5.
When he’d asked how her day was, she always said the same thing: ‘I’ve had a dog day, Bill.’
‘Anything I can do to help?’ he’d ask.
‘Nah,’ she’d say, playing with the tags that hung around her neck. ‘All part of the job, I suppose.’
Bill opened the first file and read about the different codes that someone might use in a message. The first type of code used ciphers or substitution of letters. He tried various permutations, starting with the first letter, substituting the A for C, B for D, C for E, and so on. When the first word didn’t make any sense, he painstakingly increased the distance of the substitution, until the A became Z, B became A, and C became B. But for all his time spent on it, the first sentence was still gibberish, and with a sharp intake of breath and an hour wasted he finally discounted that method.
Bill massaged his temples with his fingers and stared at the letters. Ciphers were too obvious a choice. Presuming the letters had originated from inside the ESC where the woman from booth sixteen had discovered them, then someone would have tried to read them. But the fact the letters still existed led Bill to believe the gibberish had been too complex to decipher and that someone thought they were worth hanging on to. Isla was too smart for them. She would have figured out something unique to use, a language that wasn’t immediately obvious to just anyone. She was trained military, and her father, a military man with an obsession for security, would have taught her a few things beyond the standard textbook regime.
Bill considered using a substitution cipher wheel, the next topic mentioned in the first document he had downloaded, but he didn’t know which key to use with the algorithm. He opened the library icon and his finger hovered over the library avatar. With one touch, he could activate it, ask it about the most likely algorithms that someone would use. It was the easiest and quickest way for him to decipher the letters. As his finger continued to hover, his hesitation grew as he considered a record being made of his request, more ammunition for the World Government to build a case against him. He pinned the section in the article and moved on. If his other methods didn’t work, he would try the wheel last.
He opened another document and read about Pig Latin, where the first consonant of a word is moved to the back and the letters ‘ay’ tagged to the end. But Isla’s text didn’t fit at all—there were no ‘ay’s anywhere in her letters.
The third section discussed transposed cyphertext, but both the sender and receiver needed to know the algorithm or method to unlock the code. He couldn’t think of anything Isla might have said or left behind that would enable him to decipher it.
Bill scratched his head, frustrated. What are you trying to tell me, Isla? He quashed the urge to talk out loud. He hadn’t engaged the sound disruptor that Isla’s father had given her, even though he was sure the ITF were listening in and probably monitoring his movements more closely since his return from Exilon 5. He had a hunch they already knew about his private apartment in Nottingham and he planned to turn the place on its head later to find their bugging devices. Right now was about the letters.
He stood up and pulled down the first two rows of boxes at the window. He leaned forward and opened the blinds to look down at the street below. He watched the beggars change shifts. Those off the clock walked towards the bullet train station while new ones wrapped themselves in the filthy blankets that were left behind. Sitting cross-legged, they shivered in the bone-chilling air on Nottingham’s cold streets. People who passed by barely acknowledged their presence. Lack of energy and fight consumed all of them as they waited, praying to be picked in the lottery that would whisk them away from their troubles to Exilon 5.
Bill gave one of the street beggars a second glance as he noticed him remove something from his pocket. He grabbed his magnification glasses from his bag on the nearby chair and placed them to his eyes—the beggar pulled out a communication device. Why hadn’t he thought of it earlier! He hadn’t thought to look for ITF on the street. Bill laughed cynically and shook his head as he restacked the boxes. Then something else caught his attention. He suddenly went rigid, as though his heart had stopped. Shit. Isla had left him a clue, several to be exact, but he hadn’t had the motivation—or letters—before now to connect the dots.
Numbers. That had to be it. It was the perfect algorithm. ‘I’ve had a dog day,’ she used to say. It wasn’t that she was looking for sympathy. She had been trying to tell him something all along.
Bill ran to the bedroom and grabbed the spindle-like handles of the wardrobe door. The door creaked open and his hand slid inside. He pulled his old leather suitcase out and flung it on the bed in one swift movement.
Driven by a burst of adrenaline, his hands fumbled with the code that kept the old-style metal clasps in place. He punched in a number. The panel flashed red. He cursed. On the third try, it opened. He pulled the suitcase apart, grabbed the edges and turned it upside down. Everything he owned that mattered to him fell out onto the bed. He ran his hand along the smooth base of the suitcase until he heard a click. He removed the false panel and tossed it onto the floor. Among the hidden items were Isla’s dog tags, the ones she had been given when she first transferred to Exilon 5.
He ran his finger over the indented metal tag, over Isla’s name, but more importantly over the nine-digit number that had been allocated to her:
8 9 6 7 3 4 5 1 2
Bill clutched the dog tags so tightly they bit into his skin. He returned to the kitchen table and grabbed the first letter. He remained standing as he thought about keying the information into his DPad for speed and accuracy, but he couldn’t risk it. Instead, he flipped over one of the other letters, fished a pen out of one of Isla’s boxes and began to scribble the numbers down on the back. He took the first line of text from letter one:
Dhtei teiao osonm dorta etire estch cehae ihaed veust
He listed each of the words into columns, as the article on transposed cyphertext had suggested.
D T O D E E C I V
H E S O T S E H E
T I O R I T H A U
E A N T R C A E S
I O M A E H E D T
Then he placed Isla’s dog tag number on the top row above each letter and rearranged them in numerical order. Suddenly words began to appear.
I V E C O D E D T
H E S E S O T H E
A U T H O R I T I
E S C A N T R E A
D T H E M A E I O
He shook his head and smiled smugly. ‘Isla, you crafty quine,’ he said playfully, in the thickest Scottish accent he could muster. His hands shook as the adrenaline receded a little. As quickly as he could, he applied the code to the rest of the text until he had deciphered the first letter:
I’ve coded these so the authorities can’t read them. Remember our conversation about speaking in code? This is what I came up with. Sorry I couldn’t tell you before. If you’re reading these, I’m in too deep to turn back. Indigenes need help.
Bill scrubbed his scalp with his fingers and tried to steady his nerves as he quickly applied the same method to the three remaining letters. He read them several times.
CD has asked DG to spy on me. They have already searched my locker at work, probably looking for these. I have hidden them away, but if they get their hands on them, they should be meaningless. I have a contact on E5. He is more open to change, I think.
We were ordered to fl
ush the Indigenes out of their hiding place and into the open. The government wants us to capture one, so they can study it in greater detail. You need to tell the Indigenes this. I never had a chance to; they pulled me off the case before I could. Trust your instincts, Bill. You were always good at that.
The military are playing games with me, probably at CD’s request. I don’t know how much longer I will last here. They have created individual files on each of the Indigenes, the ones who’ve surfaced in the last year. They seem most interested in the younger ones, the second generation. You have to warn the Indigenes. Nothing else matters. Remember I love you.
Bill tossed the letters onto the table and sat hard into the chair; his legs suddenly weakened. He leaned forward and grabbed clumps of his grey speckled hair in his hands. He pulled repeatedly at it. Hours passed in this way. To him, it felt like seconds.
Chapter 2
End of May 2163, Passenger ship
Stephen’s attempts to board the passenger ship to Exilon 5 had gone smoothly. The authorities weren’t looking for another stowaway, and so far, his stolen identity chip hadn’t given away his presence on the ship. His priority was to get to Exilon 5 before they figured out a second chip had been taken.