Chaos Cipher

by Den Harrington

  ‘This is for you, Doctor,’ Filipe declared with an inebriated smile. Malik noticed how alcohol seemed to cling to him, he’d only had a few glasses and the smell stuck to him like he was a brewery.

  It was not the besotted and debauched behaviour he had been expecting and could have expected from his time period, they were elegant, young, established and well mannered, probably stimulated by super-drugs rather than alcohol. They regarded him with respectful applause and not some overwhelming cheer and did so with a semblance of pride and propriety that Malik Serat may have once known from his Father’s side of the family, his mother had never been one for celebration.

  ‘Welcome home, monsieur,’ said Filipe.

  ‘This is not my home,’ said Malik distantly.

  The V-TOL plane rolled through the opening in the foyer and eventually met with another elevator. It glided inside, a perfect fit, as though the purpose of the elevator was for this very vehicle. And the doors closed before the platform began to ascend once more through the building.

  ‘This is us,’ Filipe explained throwing the glass recklessly aside and standing from his padded black leather seat to open the door. Malik waited until Filipe was out of the cabin and stretching his arms and legs in the elevator somewhere. Then he too stepped out of the vehicle.

  ‘What is this place?’

  ‘This is one of your homes, Malik,’ he reminded gently touching the Doctor’s shoulder. ‘We’re going to get you the best treatment, get rid of your psychosomatic problems and grow your hair back. You’ll be fixed up again, back to your happy old self. Then you can tell us how things fell apart on the Erebus.’

  The elevator finally arrived at the penthouse and the doors slid into the walls and opened up. Malik followed Filipe into the room outside. There must have been three hundred square metres of space, expanding into a rounded open area, lit elegantly in auspicious blooms of gold and black pearl. Floor to ceiling windows encompassed most of the building, creating a panoramic vista of the quarry and the lake outside. He could see now that lasers and light shows were patterned onto the far limestone walls to create interesting projection mapped displays which changed the rock face into an entertainment feature of cinematic art. Further inside he saw the flaked black shadows of things once living, birds of prey stuffed and positioned with huge wingspans like blackened spectres in their ghoulish drapes frozen as in time in the dim light. These were species he had been told were now extinct, preserved only to gaze at now. The far wall obtained a mounted shark, vertically halved to fit the wall, while its other half lay preserved in glass by the veranda’s transparent doors, its internals perfectly visible to see and sealed in the material.

  He stepped across the black marble floor where arabesque frescoes swirled in animated shifting demonstrations beneath his feet. He saw animated there golden ripples shimmering out from under his gecko socks where he stepped as though he was walking above a liquid surface of gold. He saw projection map fields still active and glowing by the large black-leather corner couches and the lambencies of a radiant plasma ball contained within a magnetic field giving out soft waves of heat and light. There was an open kitchen with table tops and work surfaces and wenge cupboards, there was even an old fashioned zero-energy bio fridge he recognised from his youth, a vertical storage vat with a bio-polymer gel containing bits of food in air bubbles. This was the only aspect that remained primitive and revivalist of an old capitalist culture in an energy crisis. He’d already learned the traditional methods of receiving goods were by drone air postage. And dominating the central open space stood a large and slender shaped piano. Malik knew that it was an old classic, a Bogányi.

  He saw an ornamental statue of David, a traditional shrunken replica of Michelangelo’s marble masterpiece, fixed into a square pedestal which stood above a mantelpiece. Serat wasn’t happy with its position on the mantelpiece. The sculpture was aligned but not perfectly. He pointed his finger and nudged it a hair’s length into position to appease his compulsion to fidget.

  To his surprise the statue crumbled gently apart like a set of microscopic dominos, faltering like leaves to reassemble into a new shape, building up again until they formed the sculpture of Atlas down on one knee holding up the celestial globe on his shoulders.

  ‘I see my brother still collects clatonic sculpture pieces,’ said Malik.

  ‘He still prefers traditional cooking, too,’ another voice echoed from the veranda.

  A man shifted inside, head hunched as he picked at something from his suit, before stepping under the boundary of light. He was wearing a black suit fashioned rather like a tuxedo, with features of opticidyne textures and applications installed into the software of the electro-fabric. He was tall unlike Malik, and gaunt, his face chiselled with wrinkles that etched throughout his sun kissed skin, like brown leather left out in the desert. He had white hair still shaded with youthful blackness at the flanks and smartly combed and gelled into place, and his beard was long, narrow, neatly trimmed and combed with a black strip running from his lower lip to the longest hair-tip, waxed, Malik suspected, and well cared for. He had a glass of thirty year matured red wine cupped in his hand and smiled most endearingly.

  ‘Against all odds, you finally made it back to Earth, my younger big brother.’

  -19-

  Laux shifted around the new display screen, satisfied with his work. From here he’d soon be receiving transmissions from the rest of the city and the Q-net access would be complete.

  ‘Eureka supreme!’ He said with his hands up to the screen, blowing kisses to the new setup. ‘Speakers…I need speakers…’ he began pacing back and forth irritably. He looked at his wrist Quantic and checked the time. In Cerise Timbers they didn’t have clocks; time was irrelevant to many of the civilians. They simply didn’t care about time. But Laux was a punctilious man who saw time as something more than just a method for social management. He saw it as an absolute necessity for calculations, for deadlines, for fermentation periods. He’d gone as far as to set up receivers that could pick up messages from the Atominii, messages relaying the global time. The Atominii clocks were called C.A.L.C stations, Caesium Atomic Lagrange Clocks. They were set up into points of space where a negative gravitational influence occurred in Lagrange points. Quantum computers return the data in qubits to the Atominii, a superluminal communication, instant data using entangled particles and basic Morse code. It’s all synchronised into one true time, and Laux was proud he’d found a way to acquire that time. A silent achievement, since nobody else here cared.

  His Quantic-W was currently running several timings on different schedules, a watch with many coloured fingers, each one representing a different count down. Each one gauging only Laux knew what.

  ‘Where’s the kid?’ he said pacing back and forth again. He ran his sleeve up and checked the time. ‘The kid the kid, where is he?’

  Suddenly there was a crash as wires, cables and broken equipment spilled to the floor, all heaping from a torn backpack which crashed there heavily. Laux glared with big brown eyes at young Kyo who stood above the backpack, his nose running with blood, his eye bruised and his cheek scuffed. He was gasping for air and he let the wounds speak for themselves.

  ‘Holy Atomagod!’ He harked, running to the boy’s aid. Laux tilted his head to check his nose and slowly turned it the other way.

  ‘Ouch!’ Kyo moaned. ‘Agh-no no no…ooff!’

  ‘Look at me.’

  ‘Just a second.’

  ‘Eyes straight.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Can you see this?’ he said, taking a chewed up pencil from his top pocket.

  ‘Yeah I said I’d stop eating those…’

  ‘Eyes forward, follow the pencil…up…down…now follow.’

  Laux observed closely as Kyo’s eyes followed the pencil from side to side and he saw the bruising on the eye was quite severe.

  ‘Let’s get you cleaned up,’ he smiled amiably.

  Laux dashed to the firs
t aid cabinet and opened the shutters to retrieve one of the vials. He hurried over with swabs and cotton and after dabbing the liquid applied it to Kyo’s wounds. Kyo sat on a nearby stool and Laux put on a pair of glasses as he worked. They looked like the bottom of jam jars, bloating his eyes like fisheye lenses.

  ‘So do you wanna tell me who did this to you?’ Laux asked, sitting in front of the kid and dabbing his brow.

  ‘No,’ he hissed in pain. ‘Not really.’

  ‘Somebody you know?’

  ‘Not personally,’ and Kyo thought about what he’d said. ‘Well…I guess now it’s personal.’

  ‘Uh-hu.’

  ‘But before I’d only heard of him.’

  ‘It was another kid who did this to you?’

  ‘Yeah. An older boy. I guess he’s like eighteen or something. Bigger too.’

  ‘Well the good news is you’ll be right as rain again in a couple of days. Olympians are fast healers.’ Laux noted. ‘You’ve strong bones. I believe there’s nothing broken here.’

  ‘Feels broken,’ Kyo sniffled.

  ‘No, it’s perfectly fine,’ Laux nodded, ‘maybe a minor fracture. Some bruising on your eye that concerns me a little but if you can see then you’ll be back to nibbling my pencils and pens again soon.’

  ‘You got any whiskey?’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty one-’

  ‘Yeah, real cute,’ Laux said with a frown. ‘None for you, youngster.’

  ‘Well,’ Kyo sighed looking down, ‘sorry about your equipment.’

  ‘Ahh, that doesn’t matter,’ Laux shrugged, ‘what matters is that you’re safe.’ And the Professor patted both his shoulders and gave them a firm squeeze. Laux gathered his things from the table, cleaning up the blood swabbed cotton and buds then scrapped everything into a nearby bucket. He put a plaster over Kyo’s nose and nodded in his usual approving way.

  ‘All done,’ he said. ‘You’ll fit right in around here wearing those things. Pania I believe considers it a fashion statement.’

  Laux turned around and took hold of the beaker and headed back to the first aid cabinet. He kicked wires from his legs and tripped slightly, a clinking and scattering of tools ringing out over the floor.

  ‘Do you have any enemies, Laux?’ Kyo asked, leaning over the table. His voice sounded nasally with the blocked nose.

  ‘Oh,’ Laux started, removing his large glasses and putting them away in the cabinet. ‘I’ve a few.’

  ‘Anybody I know?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Laux said, ‘not unless you’ve wondered around the Atominii cities or overpopulated areas of the hardlands.’

  ‘You don’t talk much about your past,’ Kyo said. ‘How come? My pops always said that the past is part of your identity.’

  Laux raised his eyebrows and glared into space for a moment.

  ‘He’s not wrong,’ he said almost to himself. ‘But! One must be careful never to live in the past.’

  ‘You mean…nostalgia?’

  ‘Precisely!’ Laux smiled wide. ‘You might just miss something important happening now.’

  Laux stepped around to a large sheet cover which lay over another work desk. He smiled proudly, reached down and drew back the dust cover.

  ‘Like this for example!’ He said.

  Kyo stood up and stepped away from the wooden stool where he was sat and looked curiously at the device. It was a round cylindrical machine, plated with a strange copper like material and he could see disks and dishes of varying sizes.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a holographic projection unit,’ he said excitedly. ‘A photo-holography prototype. Although, it is not functioning very well just yet. The holograms are only very small and the power it takes to run it outweighs the rational basis of having it.’

  ‘So…’ Kyo was confused. ‘…why?’

  ‘Because I can!’ He smiled giddily. ‘I’m doing everything I can to test my construction abilities. The more I do, the quicker I become, the more I learn. Trial and error kid. Trial and error.’

  ‘You can make holograms in there?’ he asked.

  ‘Yup!’ Laux announced.

  ‘But why do you want to?’

  ‘Well in the Atominii materialism took on a digital form.’ Laux explained. ‘Many of the Atominii people believe themselves to be mystics of a sort because they can make immaterial items transmogrify into material ones. It was more efficient for them, you see, economical and resource friendly to have exotically designed digital concepts and beautifully designed artificial things. There are one or two items that I will be able to get back, things I used to own and love aesthetically speaking. And speaking of nostalgia I would greatly like to see them and hold them again. But first, I’m going to need to build suitable fuel cell electrodes. I’m working on some individual ceramic plates to contrive the ancient lost art of hydro-carbon fuel to-’

  ‘You lost me,’ Kyo suddenly broke in.

  ‘It’s a big battery.’

  ‘How do you know how to do all this stuff?’ Kyo said folding his arms.

  ‘When they kick you out of the Atominii they burn off your neural implants so you can never get their high-tech update assurances,’ he said pointing to his own head. ‘Well I feel I’ve a right to keep hold of my own research and access it whenever I want. When I knew I was on my way out I took all the data I would need to build a lab and the blueprints and material itinerary to construct whatever I want. Essentially there’s about sixty thousand full scale plans and a hundred thousand material inventories all stored away into my DNA memory, information I can access using a mnemonic recall node. After they burned out my implants, the hardest part was finding a technician in the hardlands who could get the recall node operating. After that a whole world of engineering information could be translated from my DNA and uploaded as a real memory. Once I found the person for the job a whole wealth of information burst into life within my head. Too much I should say!! It was maddening! That’s why I’m seen as a little odd because I’m always working, Kyo. Every time I remember and recall those mnemonics takes me back to that very day when all that information was first unzipped in my head. Memory is a strange thing, you see. When we remember something, we are actually remembering the last time we thought of that thing, if you can get your head around that! I was cursed to have a brain with infallible access to information without needing an update.’ Laux was pacing around eccentrically, eyes wild with excitement. ‘What better subject to test out your ideas than on one’s self? They said it was madness…but I did it! I robbed the Atominii of that which they hold most sacredly private, that which they have stolen from so many others for their own avaricious deeds. Information!’

  ‘Jesus Laux,’ Kyo gasped scratching his head. ‘You just never stop do you?’

  ‘Well no,’ Laux laughed, ‘why would I do that?’

  They were suddenly alerted to footsteps hurrying through the hangar. Kyo and Laux turned to see Pania step into the laboratory space and she dropped her backpack and saw Kyo.

  ‘What happened?’ she gasped, approaching him.

  ‘Some asshole jumped me.’ He said, wincing painfully as Pania turned his head to check the wounds. ‘I’m okay though.’ He assured. ‘Professor Laux patched me up.’

  ‘Sure he’s okay!’ A voice announced from the upper platforms.

  They cast their eyes to see Edge Fenris leaning over the rails with a cigarette in his mouth and a vial in his hand.

  ‘That kid is an Olympian.’ He announced rakishly. ‘They don’t come much tougher than those things. That’s why they’re banned from being on the planet. If the Atominii ever caught him they’d burn him alive and somebody here knows that. Somebody here doesn’t like him being here…’

  ‘Everybody here knows that,’ Pania asserted. ‘You been drinking?’

  ‘Just a slosh!’ He smiled holding high one of Laux’s empty vials.

  ‘Sure but Kyo’s accepted here,’ Laux pointed out. ‘Mos
t people have loved him for years. He’s a citizen and nothing less. A betrayal to him is a betrayal to the whole East B’One community. Lord knows if the Atominii learn we’re keeping an asylum for an Olympian boy they’d have all the reason they need to invade this heathenish place and neutralise us for cultivating genetic terrorism.’

  ‘There’s only one son of a bitch who would want to betray the whole city.’ Edge Fenris growled leaning dangerously far over the rails with a virulent and bloodthirsty grin. ‘Pierce Lewis!’

  ‘Did Pierce do this to you?’ Pania asked the kid.

  ‘No,’ Kyo said shaking his head. ‘Somebody named Hattle.’

  ‘Hattle?’

  ‘I’ve seen him around,’ said Kyo. ‘He’s always at the sports complex. He’s a boxer. Got red hair.’

  ‘The champ!’ Fenris shouted. ‘Hattle The-Uppercut-Kid! He’s the city fighter, one of our best. You’ll be interested to learn he’s also Pierce’s son. Pierce organises fights for him. There’s one coming up staring our culprit in question.’

  ‘You follow boxing?’ Pania asked.

  ‘Of course I do!’ Edge smiled tipping back the last drips of spirits. ‘It’s a pastime. Though I’ve never tried it personally. I’m better with my words than with knocking heads.’

  ‘When’s the fight?’ Pania asked, putting her hands on her hips. ‘I think I’d like to go see this asshole Hattle.’