Chaos Cipher

by Den Harrington

  ‘Doctor Serat?’ Yerma called. ‘Doctor, please return to the testing area.’

  He scrutinised the black X like it would do something, like it was about to come to life and swallow him whole. His breathing grew louder, more fearful. Malik Serat was growing dizzy.

  ‘Malik!’ She shouted.

  ‘Where am I?’ he grunted.

  ‘You’re in the testing area…’

  ‘I know that much,’ he said angrily. ‘Where is this place? Where am I? This is not the Erebus.’

  ‘You’re on Orandoré station orbiting Earth.’

  Malik Serat glared at his hands to see if he was dreaming or not. He wasn’t sure ultimately. But he would conclude he was not at this point. He popped the lid back on the pen and returned awkwardly to his seat.

  ‘We need to run a few more tests,’ Yerma started. ‘I need you to concentrate please.’

  ‘May I keep the pen?’

  ‘Yes of course you may,’ she said softly. ‘Now please, Doctor Malik. I want you to full health before we continue.’

  Ahead of him a small white basin lifted out of the floor and came to shoulder level. He saw an arrangement of amplifiers set out on its surface.

  ‘This is a sensory test,’ she explained. ‘Ultra-haptics will render a geometric shape on the device. You won’t be able to see it, but you will be able to feel the sensory hologram. Try and tell me what shape is in the ultra-haptic field.’

  Reluctantly he reached out his hand and was surprised to feel a physical boundary in the invisible space. He used both hands now, eyes gazing ahead as he concentrated on the shapes.

  ‘It’s a pyramid,’ he said, becoming more precise. ‘Tetragonal.’

  Yerma pouted her lip and nodded to show him she was impressed.

  ‘They said geometry was your speciality.’

  ‘I studied non-linear science,’ Malik Serat declared, sitting back wearily. ‘Geometry is advantageous for metaphysical exercises and for imagining higher dimensions of space.’

  ‘Next analogue, please,’ Yerma ordered.

  Serat sat forth again, reaching his right hand over the amplifiers to feel the shape. He kept his hand still, confused by the sensations.

  ‘It’s moving.’ He said.

  ‘Yes,’ she smiled. ‘I figured it would be too easy for you otherwise.’

  Malik Serat shut his eyes. The whole cloud of reality peeled away from his consciousness. He was falling. The hull of the Erebus was cracking all around him, heating up exponentially. He tumbled in his heavy suit, gasping into the thick helmet, the fisheye lens dome cracking in the extreme blasts of radiation.

  ‘It’s not a three dimensional shape,’ he decided, sitting back.

  Yerma’s smile was giving the game away, she mirrored the window.

  ‘You’re passing a four dimensional shape through a three dimensional field. It’s moving vertically.’

  Malik stared at his gaunt reflection a little longer as his mind rendered the geometric analogue.

  ‘It’s a simplex,’ said Serat. ‘Ninety six edges, twenty four vertices. It’s a twenty four cell.’ And without being prompted he added. ‘A beautiful example of chaos forming order - like a four dimensional snow flake.’

  ‘Sounds like you admire this one,’ said Yerma, turning the glass once more transparent. She allowed the lighting contrast to rise and he could see she was wearing a dark uniform with a green insignia and electronic nodes on the tight fitted jumpsuit, and a white jacket over her shoulder that was long and draping.

  ‘I admire purity,’ he admitted. ‘There’s nothing pure about the twenty four cell. It’s nice and neat. If you want real chaos…you’d have to imagine the dimensional reach of a three hundred and eighty six cell in five dimensions. Now we’re talking chaos. That is pure.’

  ‘Is this what you believe?’

  ‘Yes, I believe in purity,’ said Malik Serat, ‘and chaos is pure, like the chaos in the heart of a black hole is absolutely pure and so elegantly simple at the same time. I’ve lived it, trust me. Pure chaos. Yet, there is logic to it. The sands find the bottom of the sea; the air finds its place between earth and the cosmos. Shadow finds its hiding place behind objects and light brings into existence almost everything. Everything distils. Entropy disperses energy to seek equilibrium. We humans build to destroy and rebuild for destruction’s calling. This is the very chemistry of life. We fight it, falling to pieces…shattering like glass ready to be rebuilt. Oh - how we fight it.’

  ‘Purity is an ambiguous thing to believe in, wouldn’t you agree?’ she asked, folding her arms.

  ‘Credo ut intelligam.’ Malik Serat crowed. ‘To believe so to understand. But to destroy, so as to know. What is it that you believe?’

  Yerma chose not to respond; rather she remained occupationally stilted and hoped for Malik Serat to field his own question.

  ‘I think you believe in something Miss Holts. Do you believe in God?’ he asked with an awry smirk, still shaking, but coming to life with his own thoughts.

  ‘I believe...’ Yerma said with careful deliberation, ‘in some higher power above me, yes. I am a Titan of the Atominii. It’s my right and freedom to believe there is something more to this and more than myself.’

  ‘And so then, you must believe in good and evil?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ Serat scowled suddenly, pulling himself away from the haptic hologram to analyse her. ‘I mean, all I see is people. People, people, people, people, people. Weak and feeble, overestimated. Over bred. Over fed. Over stimulated, over worked, and over fought, over and over and over. Fucking people! It’s just us and our beliefs. It has been the condition of man to ignore truth and accept absurdity for far too long now. Credo quia absurdum est, Doctor Yerma. I assume you know Latin?’

  Yerma nodded her head, smiling, waiting to be indulged.

  ‘It means I believe it because it’s absurd. And as the French philosopher Voltaire once said, those who can make you believe in absurdity can make you commit atrocity. Belief is a mysterious thing indeed…don’t you think?’

  Malik sat back, lifted his nose confidently as though he might get a scent of what perfume Yerma was wearing but he did not.

  ‘There are those who called me aloof.’ Malik Serat was smiling at this. ‘Uncouth even.’ He added and there was no mistaking his pride. ‘One of the Erebus crew members Dale Hister, once told me religion is an ideology enforced through indoctrination. Spirituality, he said, is yours. It’s your experience, your life, your essence, your thought. Hister was the Erebus spiritual guidance officer, an early pneumatan. That was his belief.’

  ‘That’s an interesting perspective,’ Yerma said, leaning on one of the consoles as she spoke with Malik through the window.

  ‘Do you want to know what I told him?’

  ‘Of course,’ she smiled.

  ‘That I believe in chaos.’ He said. ‘I understand it deeply. Chaos is my nature, my spirituality, my intuition and it is guided by experience. I have studied the consequences of it as well as natures of it. I know truly it exists. It is not an absurdity, it is neither good nor evil, but a pure truth that inspires in us our need to assemble and order. Things breaking into disorder and then restructuring, always fighting the great disembark, death seeding life finding death cyclically. Breaking apart, restructuring all evolutionary trial and error.

  ‘How can you believe your spirituality is anything without the forces of chaos and entropy? Chaos is the absolute dimension, not time. The idea of time will die. Chaos is imminent and the direction of matter is the vector that creates time, not the other way around.’ Malik simpered eerily, ‘time and matter. Matter and time...’ and he leaned forth, returning his hand to the haptic field to sense the hypercube unfolding into three dimensional space, like a crucifix built of cubes. ‘It’s all just a matter of time.’

  -8-

  The sun was high on the hills of the Novus, the outskirt boarders of Cerise Timbers. For a hundred miles in ev
ery direction scouts like Jasper and his team patrolled the lands, hunting down drones and keeping an eye on enemy activity. To the South, they had alliances with the Kazakhstan Confederalism. But there were also many dangers coming from the Cyber-Caliphates beyond, where many anarchist allies were fighting a fierce war against a spreading rogue-Atominii. To the North lay the threat of Moscowai’s Atominii, and the recent activities in his area brought about whispers that made Jasper nervous, rumours about the reappearance of Blue Lycans.

  Fimble was rattling on the dashboard of the ranger jeep while Jasper stood over the wheel, binoculars up to his eyes. Somewhere in the back he was aware of Lexy positioned beneath a Mag-Spear Megawatt Gauss weapon, a specialised makeshift velociter. Like an oversized shotgun it pointed restively to the sky, hinged to a high framed fulcrum above the rear seat on which it pivoted. Fimble’s fingers drummed away, percussively tapping out a beat as he masticated on some sugar gum and stared pensively from behind his sunshades.

  ‘Got it,’ he muttered. ‘Hmm…yeah…got it.’

  Jasper turned his head, his attention to the Novus broken. He piqued slightly with a scowl and returned his gaze on the vast hot and dry tundra, trying not to listen to Fimble’s mumbles and humming. His Eagle-Clan tattoo twitched over his forearm as he drummed at the dashboard.

  Lexy lay back, her hands behind her large helmet, her foot rocking to the rhythm of Fimble’s beat.

  ‘Hmm…yeah…okay, Jasper, listen up I got one.’

  Fimble sat forward and back hand swiped Jasper’s shoulder to get his attention.

  ‘What, what?’ he hissed angrily.

  ‘I got one, listen up man.’

  ‘I’m listening man, Jesus!’

  ‘Okay. Alright. Yo. Yo. Listen.’

  Fimble cleared his throat and puckered his lips, taking two or three deep breaths through his nose. He made a big show of preparing himself, something intense was about to follow, something real. Fimble started tapping, beating his fingers, timing himself in.

  ‘Magazines like lead bricks set aside by the gearstick

  Another day out in the Novus, in the rangers, hills roll past

  Kick-back, we’re the scouters, setting right any doubters

  Sitting tight here on the outer fringes of a new world order

  They play the game with drones

  We got them checked with guns

  Nobody out there gonna own me

  Our ranger’s pickin up twelve gee

  Got Lexy in the back, enlightened

  Stick a Gauss up the ass of them Titans

  My words if nothing’s gonna frighten

  Them Titan niggas we’re gonna ride’em!

  Belts strapped and hearts jacked, sand storms and cataracts

  Electric eyes are flying high, my faith in God is running dry…’

  Jasper had pulled away from his binoculars at this point. Lexy sat up, head bobbing to the plosives and syllabic delivery of Fimble’s prose. And on he went for another minute, excited by his improvised stanza, catching the words that described their jeep, burning drones, the rolling endless hills of the Novus and the fall of the Atominii. When Fimble was done he was standing on his seat, lapping up praise from Lexy as together they howled chanting ‘We Novus thrillers are drone killers, we thrill seekers and cyber reapers.’ Jasper tried not to show he was impressed.

  ‘How long you had that one in the bag?’ Jasper asked with a half-smile, returning his gaze to the binoculars.

  ‘Every time we come out here,’ said Fimble, high-fiving Lexy and swinging on the jeep’s frame back into his seat. ‘I think up a little more every day.’

  ‘You liked it, didn’t you?’ Lexy teased Jasper, kicking his seat.

  ‘Knock it off Alexis! I need to watch out.’

  ‘We should have brought some kind of canvas out to cover us because it is hot as hell today.’ Lexy complained, rocking back into her seat.

  ‘Six more shifts,’ said Jasper into his binoculars. ‘That’s what we promised. Duty served.’

  ‘Duty served,’ Lexy echoed.

  Fimble was drumming again, humming his words, rattling out another rap in his mind.

  ‘Hey,’ said Jasper over his shoulder. ‘Lex, look here.’

  She sat up, nudging her helmet back slightly over her shaven head, kneeling across the gearbox to see through the binoculars.

  ‘What am I looking at?’

  ‘About twenty clicks North West,’ he said. ‘See that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It looks like a building, really faint but just visible over the hills. It’s a mirage; you can only see it because the air is hot.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Know what that is?’

  She sat back, shrugged, set her hands on the front seats for balance.

  ‘That place is an old fulfilment centre,’ he said sitting back and resting his wrist over the steering wheel. ‘It was once a place where wage-slaves worked to make electronics, Capitalist gulags. Then the industry changed. It’s called Encybleron now.’

  ‘Funny name,’ said Fimble.

  Jasper suddenly noticed Fimble had stopped his perpetual tapping and was sat chewing loudly, his right leg bouncing on automatic, sunglasses casually concerned with the horizon.

  ‘Yeah well you wanna stay the fuck away from that place if you can help it,’ Jasper said. ‘That place is twisted.’

  ‘What’s it used for, Jasper?’ asked Lexy.

  ‘Neuro-commerce,’ he said. ‘It’s a testing facility for researching cyber-bio neurology on live subjects.’

  ‘What kind of research?’

  ‘The kind that’ll give you nightmares.’

  ‘Nightmares and cheap scares, neuro-phasing creepers.’ Fimble went on, humming the rest to himself. ‘Hey.’ He suddenly said, as if snapping out of his creative stream. ‘You ever been there, Jasp?’

  ‘No man,’ Jasper said, laying the binoculars down on the dash. ‘Too dangerous.’

  ‘How do you know what goes on in there?’

  ‘I saw them taking in the bodies. Missing people from the hardlands. They take them there and put them through different experiences for sensorium data harvesting. If there is a demand for a certain sensory experience in the Atominii and they haven’t logged that experience, then Encybleron wire up a subject and put them through it. They record the experience and sell it off to whoever can afford it-’

  ‘Jasper!’ Lexy suddenly uttered, pointing to the sky.

  They all saw it, falling through the blue, a streak of light tumbling down to earth, sparkling as though reflecting the hot white flare of the sun. A parachute opened to slow the plummet and they watched it glide down into the faraway lands.

  ‘What the-?’ Fimble whispered.

  ‘That ain't no drone,’ she said. ‘Ain't no cloud-seeders either. Looks like a supply drop.’

  ‘Belt up!’ Jasper ordered, turning the key in the ignition.

  The jeep grinded to life all smoke and buzz, and Jasper slammed his foot down, spinning the wheels up. Lexy settled on her back under the velociter weapon, pulling out the target screen to see ahead of them from her reclined angle. From the screen she controlled the movement of the gun, frames and lines and geometric folds of lightweight pulleys all latched to her target screen pad, allowing her free mobility to aim the weapon with her hands.

  ‘Direction?’ Jasper asked.

  Fimble chewed on his gum, fingers doing the math, maps and coordinates printed out in green fonts behind his glasses.

  ‘We’re on track, bearing West ten degrees.’ He said.

  Jasper pulled the wheel slightly, watching his compass close as he steered over rough terrain. The vehicle bounced forth, lurching on, four polymerite honeycomb airless wheels constricting and restricting in reaction to the ground. The AI pneumatics analysed the passing terrain, responding, giving suspension to their bounding advance. Lexy pushed her feet into the back of Jasper and Fimble’s seats for extra security.

&
nbsp; They’d just rounded a huge boulder on a downhill skid, Jasper steering expertly into a tailspin. The jeep slalomed and he pulled the wheel to get her back on track. Then suddenly something major broke under the cabin. Jasper’s last thought as he tumbled through the air was the transaxle had snapped. Then he hit the rocks, rolled for a few meters and lay still, unconscious and breathing dust. Fimble hit the ground hard, falling out from the passenger door and Lexy screamed as the jeep hitched vertically into the air and slammed onto its side, hauling her from the rear seats. As it trawled to a stop the jeep let out a great breath of smoke and dust. Lexy took in shallow breaths of her own and struggled, feeling that something was terribly wrong. She lifted her head and realised she was pinned beneath one of the frames; a broken spear of metal impaled her ribs and right lung. Her quivering hand reached out as the pain set in, a dreadful pulsing ache that was growing with intensity. And she could not even scream to appease its jarring persistence.

  ‘Jasper!’ She heard Fimble call. ‘Aw-shit my arm! Jasper…where you at? Lexy? Lexy?’

  Lexy reached out with her free arm, dripping with her own blood and shaking from an adrenaline rush. She mouthed his name, barely able to croak Fimble. The sound of footsteps, dense and steady trudged somewhere nearby. She saw the smoke shift in a strange way, as though curling in on itself without wind to move it, like a mirage on the horizon, a veil of heat causing an illusion. She saw the shape had body, it had weight to it, and although it appeared as a ghost, it had an unmistakable shadow that crossed the ground like a snake below. As it passed between Lexy and the sun she saw how the daylight changed in its hollow skin, saw the tones of sunlight reduced to an artificial projection, saw the sky darken in the form of a man. She knew this technology, she’d seen it before. This was photo-diffraction camouflage, optical-PDC like the kind used by…