Chaos Cipher

by Den Harrington

  -11-

  ‘Malik…

  -Malik are you listening…?’

  Hardly. Malik Serat watched Earth’s antumbra kindle before the obsidian expanse right above him. The image of the Earth in blackness was still, the sun wheeling dizzyingly around passing a frequent wink of light that died behind the planet’s circular horizon, setting the veins of the nocturnal power-grid afire like intricate luminous laces. He’d been in space longer now than he’d ever lived on the planet by Earth’s clocks. His eyes now beset on the Prussian blue sea, ponderously searching forever between all the islands and gamboge threads of light mapped across the intricate patterns of roads below as they wheeled. He thought of the Mandelbrot set, forever repeating itself in every dimension of reality, a webbed pattern compulsively done over and over and over, from the fine troughs of his skin to the patterns of the stars, from the archipelagos to the traced motions of solar systems out in the void. He was seeing a pattern in reality that carried forth through other dimensions of reality, dimensions locked out to our limited senses.

  Malik Serat understood at once that he wasn’t looking at the islands, but one of a countless set of layers in a reality too complex for the human mind to grasp with eyes alone, stemming from simplicities not yet captured in the imagination, a simple formula to explain all.

  He was looking hopelessly for a phantom, a strange tangible difference in the fabric of reality that shied away when mankind tried to confront. Much like the seemingly random shifts of time on the Erebus, it was crazy, moments catching up and over lapping, warping in an out of each other. Back on the ship, one could look over their shoulder and catch their reflection facing the wrong way. That’s when you knew you were in trouble, and it was time to mark the floors and walls with markers.

  ‘Malik look at me!’ The voice demanded.

  Slowly he looked down from the observatory window of the planet above him. The interview room was large, cylindrical, sterile and evenly illuminated. They’d provided him with a jumpsuit, a black, grey and orange padded suit with zippers and pockets at the thigh and ribs. Across from him stood two security personnel armoured in dense black suits, they looked pristine. Each of them had some kind of device attached to their lower jaws that he didn’t recognise and he imagined it was for communication. The speaker was a tall dark skinned man named Duval who told Serat he was the station owner. He spoke with stringent tenet, strong authority carrying years of experience within his tone. He was wearing a grey suit and white shirt, a strange cravat that seemed to be shifting with soft pencil lines, mapping out shapes and dots. His jacket had collars that flared up and neat black epaulettes. Beside him stood the station Ambassador, Rory Felix, a shorter man with aged and wrinkled face. He had thick dark red hair that was turning grey at the flanks. He wore what looked like a standard uniformed jumpsuit for the station, the kind he’d seen Yerma wearing on her off-duty hours.

  ‘Doctor Serat you will understand,’ Duval was saying, ‘that speaking in riddles about what happened on the Erebus will do nothing but condemn you as guilty to its destruction. We need the truth.’

  The black box recordings were purged into the black hole, along with half the ship’s mass. They’d gotten too close to the singularity, far to close.

  ‘You haven’t told me about the survivors,’ said Malik Serat fiercely. ‘Where are you keeping Penelope Hurt?’

  ‘Doctor,’ said Felix softly. ‘I’m sorry but there’s no nice way to say this. Penelope Hurt is dead.’

  ‘No,’ Serat sulked and shook his head, desperate to control his buoying emotions. ‘I saw her go into cryonics. I remember.’

  ‘We found her,’ said Duval ‘in a million pieces of ice.’

  ‘No!’ Serat cholerically snarled, vexed by Duval’s lack of sensitivity.

  ‘We found Captain Zemi,’ he continued, ‘frozen, but when we thawed him out his internals were covered in tumours and partially liquefied from radiation exposure. We concede there was an effort to try and preserve him for recovery but there’s no bringing him back.’

  ‘As for the other crew members,’ said Felix, ‘their whereabouts is a mystery but there’s eight unaccounted for including three state-of-the-art AI units.’

  ‘What about Scott Barnes?’ Malik said indignantly. ‘Is he alive?’

  Duval and Felix shared a solicitous glance, wondering whether to tell him.

  ‘Actually our Canaries found him wondering around the ship.’ Felix divulged. ‘He was dazed and half crazed. We still don’t know how he got out of cryonics.’

  Malik Serat had retired to his thoughts. He sat there broodingly, looking at neither man, yet both saw a process occurring behind his eyes, a process he had stopped relaying suddenly.

  ‘We were hoping you could tell us how you think that might have happened?’

  Malik Serat looked up.

  ‘A miss-timed wake-up,’ he uttered, ‘a malfunction in the cryonic sarcophagus perhaps, emergency revival to control the subject’s return to life rather than thawing at the incorrect rate. Maybe the computer calculated a quick decision to save him using a controlled revival. Your guess is as good as mine.’

  ‘Extensive damage has been done to the Erebus,’ Felix documented. ‘Naturally the ship’s original investors are now deceased and some of the companies since have gone through changes. Honestly nobody expected you’d return once you had gone past the deadline. But there is one investor who is still alive. He’s particularly interested in what happened out there. He’s especially concerned about you Malik. He wants the best treatment for you.’

  Malik Serat lifted his head again, wincing in confusion.

  ‘This individual bought out many of the original investors of the Erebus project and personally took over many of the project debts.’ Felix said.

  Malik still had no idea who this could be.

  ‘We need to know what happened out there.’

  The sun fell fully behind the great earthly body, the last of its blue light edging off the stratosphere like a polar wind sweeping snow gusts from a cliff edge, before fading behind the eclipse.

  ‘Malik,’ the station Ambassador re-joined from the far side of the room. ‘I’m sure this is a difficult time for you, but there are only two survivors of the Erebus, you...and Barnes.’

  He let that sink in before continuing.

  ‘Back when you accepted this mission you contracted yourself subordinate to the requirements of the participatory enterprises at the time, the Old Oligarchy…’

  Malik was laughing.

  ‘Accept the mission?’ he said. ‘We were born for it. We were all genetically altered to survive cryonic stasis. We were all developed for the Erebus. It was our purpose. Our one and only calling. I accepted nothing. I never had a choice. The Erebus was my life.’

  Duval and Felix had both overlooked that point. Neither was privy to quite how the operation was begun.

  ‘Well,’ said Felix. ‘A lot has changed since that period. And we have to prepare you for these changes so you don’t experience chronoshock. Almost every known nation involved in the Erebus and Osiris projects agreed to respect a safe home when you return. But today...most people scarcely even remember the Erebus project. This means we must set you through these stages, constant psychiatric profiling, constant adjustment programs, constant didactic updates on history otherwise you’ll have quite a shock when you return to the surface.’

  ‘You and Penelope Hurt were very close, I assume?’ asked Duval.

  ‘I had a deep respect for her,’ Malik said dreamily. ‘We had an understanding I shared with nobody before.’

  ‘Eight of your crew have died out there and we want to know how and why...’ said Ambassador Felix, ‘she wasn’t the only one.’

  Malik Serat removed a black marker pen from the pocket of his black and grey jumpsuit, the one given to him by Yerma.

  ‘Rest assured gentlemen,’ Serat smiled, kneeling down to mark an X on the floor. ‘Nothing truly dies in the eye of chaos. T
hings are merely reborn.’

  ‘Well eight of them have done so very successfully.’ Duval vexed. ‘We have to document the full story for your debriefing. Even the Erebus was top of the range technology in its time and is still admired today for its sophistication and engineering. With that in mind, why have your flight records been deleted? Why is your black-box literally torn from its place and missing? Where’s your research data? What on earth did you do to the bridge? It’s a toxic radioactive hell up there. And all you came back with is a single temporal anchor test.’

  ‘Not that it matters,’ Serat adduced, ‘not that any of it matters now. The world has already forgotten our sacrifice. All but one investor apparently knows who we even are and what we stood for.’

  ‘What you stood for?’ Felix asked. ‘What was that, exactly?’

  ‘That no depth of knowledge must go unexplored, no-single thing unaccounted for in the sphere of our empirical wisdom.’ Serat began, dictating as though it was a speech logged in his memory, burned there through years of repetition. It was his solemn vow. ‘Should such a thing exist, it does so against our reason and accord. Be it the deepest oceans and dead stars, to the clockwork of the heavens and the mechanics of the atoms, all must be known. This is the oath we take in the name of new horizons.’

  ‘The Second Horizon is a myth, Malik Serat!’ Duval seethed. ‘Now would you kindly stop doodling on my station?’

  Malik Serat stood over the marked X. He waited patiently, and then looked back to the two men, his radium eyes slightly aglow.

  ‘Yerma Holts informed me about your graphomania.’ Felix said. ‘Why do you feel the need to do that?’

  Malik Serat wrote another X on the floor beside the first and popped the pen top back on the marker. He turned back to the window and watched the glowing orange and emerald cities patterning the Earth’s islands and coast lines in the nocturnal oceans below.

  ‘Malik?’ Felix voice asked from the distance, a growing distance created in his mind. An overpowering sound now invasively blotted out the calls as he slid into that space of consciousness he reserved for his nightmares. A space of retreat that was cultivated on the Erebus, listening to the radiation frequencies of the Charybdis black hole translated into static sounds-

  ‘Malik…?’

  -a space that grew louder, darker, more real. He let the static feedback crash into his mind. He heard the Charybdis sing to him as it did from the Erebus computers like a hissing snake with the deep bass rumble, audio translators feeding back from the radiation sensors outside. It was a sound that never left him. It had been his lullabies when he thought the end was close. It had long ago stopped being a field of study and transformed into a habitual craving.

  ‘Malik…?’ Felix shouted with a voice small and far. But Malik Serat was lost now. He regarded the lonely planet through the observatory window above. From outside, Malik imagined he was a single head occupying the window space on a huge lenticular counterweight, one of thousands of windows where station members went about their quotidian order. On the outer fringes the station harbours received shipments, and above elevators fired up and down on columns of light between Orandoré station and the earth’s clouds. Malik felt the movement of everything as his hyperactive mind tracked it all like irregular clockwork. And everything was in motion.

  -12-

  Dak chopped around the root with the blade of his trowel as Kyo clawed the soil to get at an onion bulb. The UV light above their heads had been switched off temporarily in the aquaponic lane where they both laboured carefully between the drainage chutes.

  ‘I hate onions,’ Kyo grumbled.

  Dak raised his head and smiled. ‘Lot-a-goodness in them onions. You ought ’a be glad we have them even if just to hate em.’

  Dak was wearing his white loose shirt today. It was smudged in parts where the soil had found it, and he was wearing jeans that were torn at the knees. His father had to use a cooking knife to stab a hole into the back of the jeans so Kyo could thread his tail through.

  ‘How’ve you been Kyo?’ Dak said, ‘apart from waking up and coming home late your mother and I don’t see heads or tails of you.’

  ‘Har har har,’ Kyo said to the pun. ‘I’ve been helping Laux deliver some equipment. He says I’m a great runner.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Dak noted. ‘You and the professor have gotten quite friendly since he came here.’

  ‘Pania too,’ he said. ‘She’s always at Hangar-Fifteen.’

  ‘She got something going on with Edge? They dating or something?’

  ‘I don’t think Edge is really her type. Sometimes they fool around I think.’

  ‘Fool around?’

  ‘You know, sometimes they fuh-’

  Kyo stopped himself and saw his father’s stern and disapproving face. It was the look that didn’t need words, the silent killer.

  ‘-fu-fool a-around.’ He continued. ‘Mostly I think they’re just friends.’

  And Kyo hooked his prehensile tail around the wicker basket’s arching handle and pulled it into his hands to snoop inside.

  ‘Okay I’ve got the beans,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ said Dak.

  ‘And I’ve got more beans,’ he smiled, ‘five leeks, parsley, two cabbages and brussel sprouts.’

  ‘Good grub,’ Dak winked as he fished through his lane and checked his basket, ‘I’ve got zucchini, corn, and okra and mustard seeds.’

  ‘Great.’ Said Kyo.

  ‘Good!’ Dak clapped his hands and stood away from the cultivation table and pressed a button to lower the UV lamp strip again.

  ‘We done?’

  ‘Not yet. Let’s get over to the higher light-level tables,’ Dak pointed, ‘we still need eggplant and tomato.’

  The aquaponic greenhouse was a large area, partially open and partially covered depending on which vegetables or mushrooms were being grown and for what purpose. The green house was organised by the local people of East B’ One and by the chefs, it was a space where anybody could grow whatever they wanted, and extended to outside areas where the natural sunlight was.

  The covered areas were smaller. This space was generally controlled not for food consumption but medicinal and operated by clinical departments in the hospital network. Many botanical professionals arranged meetings at the hospital to schedule what to grow in advance. Humidity levels and temperature varied on each segment of the green house. Seeds and grains and roots and potato were stockpiled for emergencies, seed storage was a dark room filled with cabinets and trays with label tags barcoded for ocular contacts to register.

  Kyo loved the spice rooms for the smell and the cool air. After helping Dak pick a mature eggplant they left the aquaponic centre and made their way towards Minerva Meadows. Kyo could already hear the music and he could already smell the grilled vegetables and the soups. He heard the poets pontificating on the existential meaning of being, or their mockery of the Atominii’s hypocrisy, or of Pierce Lewis and his echelon of debonairness only making an appearance should the city roll out a red carpet for him.

  They chortled and guffawed.

  ‘Come down to the people,’ one poet lampooned, ‘join humanity Mister Lewis, if it pleases you my Lord. We are ready and waiting, our compassion to accord. We have for you the greenest plants on record.’

  And there was a cheer as the poet pulled a long white paper roll from behind his ear and wedged the blunt end into his lips and one of the listeners jumped up with a lighter in hand to ignite the marijuana joint for the poet.

  ‘Do you think we give Mister Lewis a hard time?’ asked Kyo.

  ‘Oh hell yeah,’ Dak chuckled with his wicker basket under arm. ‘He brings it on himself. We keep reaching out and he keeps pushing us away. He’s only happy when he’s using our democratic channels to voice some trivial bullshit about noise pollution or immigration.’

  ‘Why do you think he stays here if he doesn’t like it?’ Kyo asked. ‘Can’t he go somewhere else?’

  �
�He could go back to the Atominii,’ Dak said. ‘I think Enaya Chahuán once proposed to fund the journey for him, but he turned it down.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Pride,’ Dak shrugged. ‘He wants to believe he can reverse things back to the way they were before the revolution.’

  Kyo landed his basket on a flimsy looking table in the camp and the chefs began rooting through the collection and collaborating and planning what they were going to do. The chefs always liked it when Dak brought Kyo. Some of the younger men and women of the group wanted to inspire him to cook and get creative, while some of the older ones wanted him to taste their long cultivated secret recipes, many of which he loved. For the odd recipe he didn’t like, Kyo politely tried to suggest the flavour was an acquired taste, without hinging too much on hurting the creative motivation of the person. It was always a delicate balance, he realised, since the artist is usually a sensitive soul. At least, that’s what Pania had told him. It wasn’t long before the night festival was underway. From all around the city they flocked to the meadows. People had built all kinds of shelters, from canvas tepees decorated with ink to tents and huge structures arranged with sound systems. There were stages with musicians practicing their performances, dancers and trapeze acts draped in long silk ribbons that hung from high supports. Kyo wondered by cabins that were once part of several aeroplanes dissected and transformed into arching metal huts where people ate and drank and cheered in the vibe of strumming guitars and accordions. And he was kissed on the cheek by happy, face painted young women. Some danced with fire poi and others with luminous Rou Cyr wheels on which they rolled by. From the beat of drums to the twang of strings and the electronic pulse of speakers, all was alive and vibrant in the Minerva Meadows by the time mid-night came around. Kyo joined a procession of dancers and spoke with others his age. It was customary for the people of Cerise Timbers to eat hallucinogenic truffles and Kyo had swallowed two and welcomed the spectral effects. Often the experience had him brooding about the ancient times, about spiritual experiences. He knew a little about history from some of the teachers in his area, they’d told him that the spiritual awakening of the 1960’s had been a failure, that it bonded a few but carried a deceptive side to it, that of accepting servitude as opposed to challenging authority. It reminded him of what Cerise Timbers were fighting for - their revolution had been won in the city, but not yet in the world. The Atominii still made demands of them, and hallucinatory mushrooms held great spiritual and mental healing, but didn’t hold the answer to freedom. For him, it was a cultural pleasure here that lay in one of the Three Circles of their city’s ideology, but they all knew there was still a great fight to be won. Kyo noticed the dilated glazed expressions of his peers and they stared back at him. Some were fascinated by his fangs, his eyes and his tail mutation. He knew they were new comers from the Atominii. The new comers always made him uncomfortable, he found it difficult to relax around them the way they singled him out like a freak. He knew they didn’t always mean it, seeing a so called Olympian genetic on earth was a big deal these days. He never liked the Olympian and Titan divisions and never cared much for it anyway. So he bid farewell, and kept on moving. There was a whole party out there and not everybody was as rude. He hoped maybe to bump into Pania and Fenris, if they weren’t busy either fighting or fooling around.