He scratches his matted beard and taps the side of his head. “I hear things. People don’t think beggars or dervishes are listening. They’re wrong. Dwell in the streets for long enough and you learn many things.” He sighs. “There is a blessing in having nothing.”
His reasoning for walking this path of austerity was so he could draw closer to Allah. But how do you spend your days squatting in poverty when starships kilometres long soar above you? When the roar of their space-faring engines are louder and more authoritative than any muezzin call ever could be?
I left the city as soon as I could. I felt stifled by its old-fashionedness. I was just a boy when Istanbul became the first metropolis in the world to construct space stations and make contact with aliens, opening up commercial spaceports a few years later in 2078. I slipped away as soon as I could, studying djinn programming off-world. I’d embraced the modern and Omar had slid in the opposite direction.
“You need to leave,” he says. “Azhar Kaadesh wants your head on a silver platter. He’s flown all the way from Dubai to look for you.” I shiver despite the muggy heat. One of the most dangerous men in this corner of the world, and he’s after me. “They’ve already found one of the other dataSultans. He washed up on the shores of the Bosphorus in pieces. Barely recognizeable.”
I try not to dwell on that. “I can’t leave. Otherwise we’re both dead.”
“Why? What’s happened?” His hands curl into tight fists and I wonder if he’s going to strike me. “Please don’t tell me you went to a Ghadesh for help.” My silence seems to be a sufficient answer. “All of people! You know those creatures can’t be trusted.”
“I need to break into the Muqarna. That’s all.”
He shakes his head. “You’ll ruin us, Sikandar.”
My temper flares. “At least I’m trying to protect our family. What the hell do you do all day?” I know I’m shouting, but I don’t care. He needs to hear this. “You just squat in the mud and pray to a god who doesn’t give a toss about any of us. You don’t get to judge. Not anymore.”
Omar bites his cracked lips, and I can see that I’ve wounded him. “I’m sorry Omar. I didn’t mean to—”
He waves a hand. “Don’t. You’re probably right.” He sinks down to the floor next to me. “After Father died—” He halts midsentence. This is the first time I’ve heard him speak about Father. “I couldn’t face the world so I turned to Allah.” He smiles that watery smile of his. “Although it seems he has not turned to me. Not yet.” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry I abandoned you, Sika. I failed you all.”
Sika. Father used to call me that. I swallow. “You can still help. I just need to get inside.”
“You work there, don’t you? Can’t you just go inside?”
“I’m not supposed to be in this city, remember? They have eyes and ears everywhere.” I can’t help but wonder if they already know where I am. I peer out the bug-spattered window and at the hulking skyscraper, half a kilometre of carved marble, glass and technology. “There has to be another way.”
“You never were one for playing it safe.” He ponders for a moment. “Give me a few days. I’ll listen around, see if I can pick up anything useful.” Again that watery smile. “You stay low in the meantime. We wouldn’t want to lose your head, would we?”
I would have laughed, but right now it’s not even funny.
I’m on top of the world.
The summer wind drifts out to the Mediterranean, tousling my hair. Istanbul yawns out like an endless Mughal carpet. Streets run like rivers through buildings of blood red, saffron yellow, and bronze. The air is electric with the whine of shuttles and starships from the spaceport that eats up kilometres of the city’s space. If I look closely, I can even see bots ghosting through the air, each and every one containing its own unique djinn.
Just not the type I’m after.
I’m perched near the lip of the Muqarna. Getting up here was the easy part—it was just a matter of hacking the access code and climbing the stairwell of the adjacent building and hopping across. Omar had indeed found a way. There’s a little balcony near the top of the Muqarna. He’d overheard two dataSultans mentioning the jammed door and they were having trouble closing it.
That’s my way in. It’s a matter of getting down there.
I’m back in my skinsuit, helmet sealed tight around my neck. I wear a harness, the sort that they use in abseiling but designed to be lightweight and skin-tight. I’ve hooked the magnetic clamp at the edge of the building and tested it and the shoulders straps half a dozen times more than necessary. But if I fall down, it’s not going to be pretty. I grin and briefly wonder how long they’d have to scrub the pavement to get bits of me out of it.
With a deep breath, I slowly descend. The harness groans, bites into my armpits and squeezes a little too tightly around my groin. I feel every square inch of the altitude beneath me, aware that only a few strips of webbing are keeping me alive. Carefully, carefully I continue lowering myself, boots clunking on the thick glass.
My hand slips on the webbing and for a moment I’m freefalling. Heart in mouth I tug on the wiring and jerk midair, slamming against the glass with enough force to splinter my ribs. For a moment, I think I black out; I don’t know which way is up or down. A mix of sweat and fear trickles down my spine. This is stupid; I’m going to get myself killed. For a moment, I’m tempted to call the whole thing off and just tell Sma to screw himself, or whatever it is the Ghadesh do. But that’d be signing my brother’s death warrant in my blood.
No. I have to see this through.
I scrape together the dregs of my sanity and continue. Ten minutes of frayed nerves and I’m nearing the balcony. It’s a square stretching out twenty metres in all directions, packed with plant life and fruit trees and all sorts of fauna. A tiny jungle nestled in the centre of an urban structure.
I’m about to close in when I hear a nasty groan from the cable. I freeze, petrified to move a muscle. Then it snaps, ripping the buckle with it and plunging me into darkness. Almost without conscious thought, I reach out and activate my armbands. They flicker to life as I land on solid flagstones. The armbands cushion the blow, take the impact, and smooth the jolt evenly through my body. It’s like razors raking my body from the inside. I teeter on the precipice of screaming, but it’d have hurt more if my spine had been snapped.
I deactivate the armbands and slip over to the door, gloved hand curled around the metal. The djinn programmers said the door lock was broken. If Omar misheard, or they got it fixed, then I’m completely screwed.
I press down the lock. The door swings open.
Empty. The halls are empty. Just rows and rows of desks, twinkling computers and blank holoscreens. I worked here almost every day, sometimes on weekends. Frantically trying to up djinn capabilities. Increase their speeds, their intelligence, their response rate, the height of their sentience.
And people died as a result.
One day, when some of the most violent and powerful gangsters in the Middle-East aren’t trying to rip my eyeballs out and tear my balls off, I’ll come back here and fix this problem and make the djinn-7 what they should have been.
Someday. Just not today.
I ghost past a cluster of marble desks, past wall-to-ceiling screens. It’s like being in another dimension, the worlds of the streets and dervishes and the worlds of high-tech and djinns sliced apart by a few inches of glass.
I go down the stairs to access the safe-lab area where the djinns are confined on another highly-secured floor. The walls here are laced with an anti-signal material that blocks anything from getting in or out. I punch the access code and slip inside. My helmet vision flicks into night-mode, and I dart over to my old workstation. It’s a recliner chair fastened in front of a crescent-shaped computer system, the ones only dataSultans can use.
I tug my helmet off, ease myself into the chair, and allow the clamps to hook me in. It takes a few seconds for the scanner to attach to my head and the cr
ystal display goggles to unfold over my eyes, and then there’s that quick bite of pain as my DNA is verified and I’m logged into the computer system. It’s like staring at a 360 degree monitor screen inside your brain, something only those with nanoImplants can keep up with.
Clutching the control prism, I make a quick sweep for the djinn.
They’re not here.
They’re gone. Scrubbed out of existence.
I do another search, more thoroughly this time. They’re still not there. Not a scrap of code left.
It’s only when I feel a cold fire lighting under my ribs that I know I’m dead.
And to top it off, Sma’s trying to get in contact. My palmer has hooked up with the system and his ID code has popped up in virtual space in front of me. I cancel it. He’s going to be pissed, but he’s going to be even more pissed once he finds out that the entire djinn-7 program has vanished.
I unplug and seal my helmet back on. I’m about to depart when I hear a metallic crink. I whip around but everything’s still. I hear it again. I know it’s not a mistake. Someone’s here.
A dismantled djinn robot rises from where it’s slumped in the corner and twists its cinderblock head with a metallic screech to stare at me. My limbs go numb but somehow I’m able to scramble for the door. I almost reach it when a drone slams into my ribs and sends me sprawling. I’m too shocked to register the pain. I make another attempt at escape when a turret arm folds out of the pristine wall and points at me. If it opens fire, I won’t stand a chance. I’ll be torn to wet red ribbons in matter of seconds.
I crouch behind a desk, heart going like a jackhammer. I’m dead. I know it. There’s no wriggling out of this one. The room’s electric, djinn-bots and drones stirring around me in a maelstrom of energy.
Suddenly I know exactly where the djinn-7 have gone.
They’re confined to these quarters, so they can’t reach the main offices. Now, I need to escape without them slipping through the door.
I’m thrown flat on my back. I twist to see the bot descend down to my face. I don’t know what it’s going to do, but I’m guessing I’m not going to like it very much.
Something jumpstarts in my head and I blurt out, “Don’t! It’s me! Sikandar!” It’s no good using anything but my real name now. The bot hesitates. “I was one of the dataSultans here. Your programmer. I’m not here to hurt you.”
The bot swivels. There’s a dash of blood from an open wound when I was smacked to the ground. The djinn extends a probe to collect a sample. My breath burns in my throat and I pick myself up as the djinn-bot sets itself down on the table, unmoving. A moment later the speakers crackle to life.
“So you’re our programmer, are you?” The voice is androgynous, neither male nor female. I’m frozen in fear. I’ve heard the high-tier djinn speak, but never with such authority. Never with so much self-assurance of their sentience.
“Yes,” I say. “Well, one of them.”
I watch the cinderblock headed bot crash to the ground, only for a drone to peel itself away from a workbench a moment later in one fluid motion. My mind fizzles. Something’s not right.
“How did you do that?” I ask.
“We don’t need just one body,” the djinn says. “Not anymore.” In a matter of seconds at least three bots have stirred to life in a flurry of twinkling lights, one after the other. And I realize that they’re streaming from one bot to the next. Travelling via the Net, freed from physical restraints like the mythological genies of old.
These aren’t djinn-7. They’re the next level: djinn-8.
And they’ve escaped their own bodies. Jumping to any device, any machine that they can reach.
I pivot to the crystal display stapled at the end of the wall as a djinn possesses it. A swirling, muscled figure of emerald green and velvet black fills the screen, wreathed in clouds, the upper two of its four arms clutching curved scimitars with the bottom two holding kilijs. My heart almost grinds to a shuddering stop. Now they’ve given themselves avatars. This cannot be good.
“How many of you are there in this room?” I ask, my throat dry.
“Six at the current time.” The djinn’s mouth works in perfect sync with the voice booming out of the speakers. Unsettling doesn’t even begin to cover it. “I’m Shamhurish. I do not know about the others.”
And of course they’ve named themselves. And I helped create these things. I’m unsure whether to be overjoyed or afraid for my life.
“They’ve kept us here in this room while they perform tests.” So they know that they can’t leave the room. “They’re trying to repair us. They still believe that we were responsible for that incident at the conference. They—”
“Wait.” I’m not sure I heard correctly. “The massacre at the conference? The one where djinns killed dozens of people?”
“It was not our fault!” The green clouds around Shamhurish flash with streaks of black and red, and for a moment I’m afraid the turret will shoot me. “Someone sent a software daemon into our server. We were unable to do anything but watch. It was not us. Now they’ve trapped us, trying to fix something that isn’t broken. We want to get out of here.”
Putting aside that I’m arguing with a djinn, I try to process all this new information. If their malfunction was the result of a third party virus and not shoddy programming, then these gangsters are after the wrong people.
It’s not hard to figure out who had the most to gain from sending the software daemon.
Sma had rigged this whole thing from the start. He counted on having the ammunition to blackmail me, and I just fell into the palm of his hand. No one else would dare touch djinn-7 after the incident, so he’d be the sole owner of multi-billion dollar djinns, intelligent enough to perform deep-space mining in asteroids and planets. He’d completely dominate the market.
Of course, Mr. Sma hadn’t counted on there being djinn-8 in existence.
“The other dataSultans,” I say on the spur of the moment. “Do you know where they are?”
Shamhurish looms upwards, expands to fill the screen. “Even better. If we have their DNA, we can track them and jump to their location.”
“Can you tell me what happened to them?”
Shamhurish takes a few seconds before coming back. “Five of them are dead, all in the last few days.”
I’m about to respond when the main door rips open and two small objects roll through. I know what the first one is. An EMP grenade. I’m unsure about the second, but after it starts spitting a whitish gas, I have a pretty good idea. The room turns to shadows as the EMP goes off and my head fills with wool.
My mind’s still foggy from the gas, but I’m conscious enough to tell that I’m strapped to a chair that’s bolted to the floor. Arms, legs, waist, chest, ankles, elbows, neck, everything. I try to shift but it’s like being set in concrete; I can’t move an inch. It’s the chair for restraining people when they inject the nanoImplants. The straps are made of thick, sturdy nanosteel, clamping skintight around me. Designed to be inescapable. I’m not going anywhere, not until they want me to.
I know who “they” are. The men who forced me to leave Earth in the first place.
My blood quickens. I’m staring right in the grinning face of Azhar Kaadesh. A cybernetic implant imbedded in his temple glows a brilliant cyan. There’s five or six others in the background, completely different in appearance but all sharing the one facial expression.
Hate.
We’re still in the same room, sealed off from the offices and the rest of the world. There’s no chance of calling for help or raising the alarm. I’m totally at their mercy.
“Been doing a little travelling, have we?”
I force a dry smile. “Oh you know, just doing the tourist things.”
“Funny, that’s not what your brother said.” Azhar grins that I’m-in-control-here grin. His breath smells like spearmint. “He really didn’t want to tell us where you went. But we . . . convinced him.”
My heart lu
rches. “Please, don’t hurt—”
“Don’t hurt him?” Azhar barks a laugh that turns my insides sour. “You killed three of mine. You’re lucky we didn’t cut his hands off.” He brings up his video palmer, and I’m staring at my brother. His face is caked in dry blood, one eye swollen shut and his breathing is slow and shallow.
But he’s alive.
“I’m so, so sorry,” he sniffs. It hurts to hear how raw his voice is. “They were going to kill me. I—”
“I’m fine,” I lie.
“They—”
“That’s enough.” The palmer is whipped away. “Looks like Allah didn’t want to lend a hand to your brother, eh?”
I’m about to respond when a giant slab of a man plants his fist in my gut. My world goes monochrome and I’m clawing for breath. Another blow hammers into my chest and for a moment I think he’s actually killed me.
“Dirty jahash,” the man spits.
“Don’t be too rough with him,” says Azhar. “We can take our time. We’ve got months.” He pulls the chest straps of my harness as I gasp for breath. “Maybe even years.”
He releases me. “It’s not torturing a man that makes him lose his dignity, you know. It’s letting him sit in his own sweat and piss, day after day, week after week. Unable to move, unable to see or scream, unable to escape the smell of his own stink. Unable to even kill himself.” He pats my thigh. “That truly drives a person mad.”
“Put the keycard for the chair around his neck,” giggles one of his men. “It’s so funny seeing them go crazy trying to get it.”
I’m pretty close to pissing myself now, but I don’t let them see it. I can’t. I’m swimming in sweat inside my skinsuit. I truly believe that they’d do that to me. Slow torture. Azhar believes I ripped his brothers away from him and he’s going to make me suffer for it.
“The other dataSultans might be involved, but you were the lead programmer,” he tells me. “Your responsibility. Your fault I had to tell my family why their sons and husbands were not coming home.” He gestures to his men. “We all lost someone that day. Someone has to answer for them.”
Where The Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 4
